The second migration is the expensive one. Most of the cost is in what does not come across, and you can establish that before committing.
What usually moves, and what usually does not
Customers and contact details generally move. Open jobs and outstanding invoices usually move with effort.
What frequently does not: job history with its notes and photos, equipment records tied to a property, maintenance agreements with their visit schedules and remaining balances, custom fields, price book structure, and anything attached to a job as a file.
Maintenance agreements are the painful one, because for a service shop they are the asset. Rebuilding six hundred agreements by hand is a real cost and it is rarely in anyone’s estimate.
Establish it before you sign, in this order
Ask the platform you are LEAVING what it exports and in what format. This is the binding constraint and the vendor you are leaving has the least incentive to help, so ask early.
Ask the platform you are JOINING what it imports, which fields map, and who does the mapping.
Ask both what happens to file attachments. This is where the answer is usually worst.
Get a real export file before you commit, and open it. Not a description of one.
The cost that never appears in a quote
Your own staff’s time reconciling records, the period of running both systems, the retraining, and the jobs that go wrong during the changeover.
A rough planning discipline: whatever the vendor says the migration takes, plan for the office to be slower for a month and budget the difference. That is not cynicism about vendors — their median customer is not you, and they are quoting the median.
What this site has not done
We have not migrated between any of these platforms and have no first-hand account of how any specific export behaves. The list above is the general structure of the problem, not a report on any product.
If you have done one of these migrations, your experience is worth more than this page.
Sources
- Workyard — secondary unverified, read
Vendor pricing changes without notice. Every figure above carries the date it was read. If a vendor’s current page disagrees with this one, the vendor’s page is right and this one is stale — and that is a bug worth reporting.
