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Moving off spreadsheets without stopping work

The software is rarely what makes a changeover fail. What makes it fail is that the changeover happens during a busy month, with no plan for the jobs already running, and everyone quietly carries on using the spreadsheet because it is Tuesday and there is work to do.

What to move, in order

• Customers and properties. Everything else hangs off these, and they are the least controversial to import.
• Price lists and standard items. Once these are in, quoting is faster than it was, which is the first visible win.
• Jobs in progress. Only the live ones — see below.
• Recurring contracts and service rounds, with their dates.
• History. Optional, and often not worth it.

Do not migrate history

The instinct is to bring everything. It is almost always the wrong call: it takes the longest, produces the most errors, and the data is least useful. Keep the old system readable for a year, export what you must to PDF, and start the new one with live work. Nobody has ever regretted having a clean customer list.

Clean it on the way through

An export is the one moment when the whole customer list is in front of you at once. Duplicates from the years when two people entered them differently, addresses without postcodes, people who moved in 2019. Fixing it in the spreadsheet before import is an afternoon; fixing it afterwards is never, because nobody ever gets round to it.

The fortnight with both

Run new jobs in the new system and let the old ones finish where they are. That is a genuine overlap rather than a double entry problem, and it has a natural end: when the last old job is invoiced, the spreadsheet is read-only. Setting that date in advance is what stops the overlap becoming permanent, which is the usual failure.

One person owns it

Not a committee and not "everyone". Someone has to decide what the standard quote wording says and what the job statuses are called, and then be the person others ask. In a firm of eight that is a few hours a week for a month, and without it the system ends up configured four different ways.

Expect a slow fortnight

Everything takes longer for two weeks. That is not a sign the choice was wrong, and knowing it in advance is what stops somebody declaring it a failure on day four. Pick a quiet part of the year if you have one.