Services - Data Migration
Migration is finished when the numbers agree, not when the load completes.
Data migration is where most CRM and ERP projects quietly lose trust. We profile the source, agree what genuinely needs to move, cleanse where the data is owned, rehearse the load more than once and hand your finance team reconciliation evidence they can sign.
At a glance
- Typical sources
- MYOB, Xero, legacy ERP, spreadsheets, access databases and prior CRMs.
- Targets
- Zoho, Odoo, GoHighLevel and integrated combinations of them.
- Sign-off
- Counts, control totals and balances reconciled and approved by your finance owner.
What moves
The five data domains we plan separately.
Each has its own rules, its own reconciliation and its own definition of complete.
Customers, suppliers and contacts
Deduplicated, standardised for Australian address and phone formats, and linked so relationships survive the move.
Products, pricing and stock
Catalogue structure, units of measure, price lists and on-hand quantities, with valuation reconciled at the cutover point.
Open transactions
Outstanding quotes, orders, jobs, invoices and purchase orders brought across live so nothing in flight is lost at cutover.
Financial balances
Opening balances, receivables, payables and tax positions loaded to agree with the closing trial balance from the old system.
History and documents
Prior activity and attachments migrated or archived to an accessible store - decided deliberately, based on what the team actually retrieves.
Method
Profile, decide, cleanse, rehearse, reconcile, cut over.
01
Profile the source
Volumes, quality, duplicates, missing mandatory fields and undocumented conventions measured before any mapping is agreed.
02
Decide scope
What migrates, what archives and what is deliberately left behind. Migrating everything is usually the most expensive option available.
03
Cleanse at source
Corrections made where the data is owned, so the old system stays usable and the cleanse is not repeated on every trial run.
04
Map and transform
Field-by-field mapping with transformation rules and defaults documented, including how unmatched values are handled.
05
Trial runs
Full rehearsals into a build environment, repeated until a run is clean, each producing reconciliation output and a defect list.
06
Reconcile and sign off
Record counts, control totals and financial balances compared against source and signed off by your finance owner, not by us.
07
Cutover
A sequenced final load inside an agreed freeze window, with rollback criteria and a decision point before the system opens to users.
The finish line
Migration is finished when the numbers agree, not when the load completes.
Profiling, rehearsed loads and reconciliation evidence your finance team can sign are the difference between a migration and a data transfer.
Scope
Migrate less than you think. Archive the rest.
Access to history matters. Loading history into a live system is a different, and usually unnecessary, decision.
Usually migrate
Operationally required
- Active customers, suppliers and contacts
- Current product, pricing and stock data
- Open orders, jobs and unpaid invoices
- Opening financial balances at cutover
- Recent activity your team actively references
Usually archive
Retain, do not load
- Long-closed transactions beyond retention need
- Inactive records with no trading history
- Superseded price lists and obsolete products
- Bulk historic email and note threads
- Anything nobody has opened in years
Principles
Three things we hold to.
01Bad data does not improve by moving
A migration is the one moment when cleansing has an obvious deadline and a clear owner. Use it, or carry the same problems into a system you just paid for.
02Reconciliation is the deliverable
A load is not complete because it finished without errors. It is complete when counts and balances tie and your finance lead has signed the evidence.
03Rehearse before you commit
The first trial run always finds something. The point of running two is that the second one should not.
Continue exploring
Tell us what you are migrating from.
A short data profiling exercise on your real source usually reshapes the whole migration plan - and the budget.