A small businessA new CRM, without losing a single quote

A small business quoted every job out of an old CRM that was showing its age. Moving to a new one meant bringing across the customers, contacts, suppliers, the product catalogue and years of quotes.

The two systems store quotes in completely different ways. In the old one, tax and shipping sat in separate rows; in the new one they belong to each line and each total. Copy it across naively and old quotes show prices the customer was never given.

I set up the new CRM in containers and wrote the move as a series of small steps, each one checked before the next.

• Worked from a copy of the old database, never the live one, with a full backup taken first.
• Kept every record’s original ID, so the links between customers, contacts, quotes and products came across intact, and checked every cross-reference before writing it.
• Rebuilt tax and shipping on each quote from the old system’s separate rows, and applied tax to every line.
• Reconciled every quote’s total against its parts. Where an old quote had never added up in the old system either, it came across exactly as it was and was noted, not quietly changed.
• Checked real records on screen, not just row counts, then securely deleted the working copy of the customer data.