Migration is where good projects get stuck. Treat it like moving house: pack by room, label boxes, unpack the essentials first.
Decide what comes across
Active leads, open bookings and payment schedules matter. Five-year-old cold leads may not. Archive the rest instead of importing noise.
Clean and map fields
Standardise phone formats, sources and statuses before import, then map each column to a CRM field. Test with a small file first.
Verify before switching off the old system
Compare counts, spot-check records and have each team confirm its own data. Switch off the old system only after sign-off.
Deciding the cut-over date
Choose a cut-over date when activity is relatively calm, not during a launch or the last week of a quarter. Announce it early, explain why it matters and agree that from that date, all new leads, visits and payments are recorded in the new system. Old files become read-only.
A short overlap can help, but keep it short. When both systems stay live for weeks, people update one and forget the other, and the data drifts apart. A firm date with a clear rule is kinder to everyone than an open-ended transition.
A worked example of field mapping
Suppose your lead sheet has columns called Name, Mobile, Project, Source, Status, Executive and Next Call. Map Name and Mobile to the lead fields, Project to the project, Source to a standard list of sources, Status to your pipeline stages, Executive to the owner and Next Call to the follow-up date.
Then look at the values. If Source contains "FB", "Facebook" and "Meta ads", choose one label. If Status contains twenty variations, reduce them to your stages. If some rows have no Executive, decide who receives unassigned leads. This mapping exercise is where most of the value of a clean migration is created.
Handling bookings and payments
Bookings and payments need more care than leads, because money is involved. Import them project by project, and check totals against your accounts records before going further. Confirm that each booking points to the right unit, buyer and partner, and that paid and remaining amounts match.
Ask accounts to sign off on a sample of bookings after import. If numbers do not match, stop and fix the mapping rather than correcting records by hand. A small delay at this stage prevents months of arguments about balances later.
What to do with history
Not every historical detail needs to move. Years of old call notes may be less useful than a short summary on each active lead. Closed deals from long ago may be better archived as a file you can search if needed. Decide what is valuable for daily work and what is only for reference.
Keep a frozen copy of every original file with the date it was taken. If a question arises months later, you can compare the old record with the new one. This safety net costs almost nothing and gives everyone confidence that nothing important was lost.
Data quality rules worth agreeing
Agree simple rules before the import. Every active lead needs an owner. Phone numbers use one format with the country code. Sources come from a fixed list. Every booking has a unit, a buyer and an amount. These rules make the new system useful from the first day.
Write the rules down and share them with the people cleaning the data. When questions arise, the rules provide answers, and the team avoids debating the same issue repeatedly.
Validating after the import
After the import, compare counts and totals with the source files: number of leads per project, number of bookings, total amount booked and total collected. Spot-check individual records with the people who know them best.
Keep a log of issues found and how they were fixed. If a pattern appears, such as a missing source for one campaign, fix the mapping and reimport rather than patching hundreds of records by hand.
Communicating with the team
People worry that a migration will lose their work. Explain what is being moved, what is being archived and how they can find old information if needed. Show them their own leads in the new system before the cut-over date.
When people see their data intact and organised, confidence grows. That confidence is essential, because a migration only succeeds when the team trusts the new system enough to stop using the old one.
Key takeaways
Move only what is worth moving, clean it against simple agreed rules and validate a sample before the full import. Treat bookings and payments with extra care and ask accounts to sign off on totals.
Set a firm cut-over date, make old files read-only and keep a frozen backup of every original. Explain the plan to the team and show people their own data in the new system early.
A calm, well-communicated migration builds the trust that every CRM rollout needs.
A practical next step
Pick one representative file from each data source this week and map its columns to the new system. That single exercise reveals most of the cleaning work ahead and gives you a realistic estimate.
Who migrates the data?
At Propto, data migration is part of configuration with Techtaru Digital, scoped in the proposal.