Moving off a subscription without losing your history.

The fear that keeps firms on software they have outgrown is rarely the price. It is the decade of records inside it, and the suspicion that leaving means starting from an empty database.

GuidePublished 14 September 2026By Ellen Brandt

What actually transfers

More than people expect. Most subscription products export their core objects cleanly enough: accounts, contacts, deals, invoices, tickets, the records that carry the value. What travels badly is the material around them, and knowing which is which in advance is most of the work.

Travels well: structured records, relationships between them, dates, amounts, owners, and custom fields you defined yourself.
Travels awkwardly: attachments and email threads, which usually come out as a separate archive that has to be re-linked.
Rarely travels: audit trails, in-product comment threads, and automations, which tend to be rebuilt rather than moved.

How the four stages run

Export first, and do it early, before anything is committed. An export is free and it tells you what you are actually working with rather than what the documentation claims. Field mapping comes second, and it is where the real decisions live: which of the forty custom fields are still used, and which were added once in 2019 and never filled in again.

Then parallel running. Both systems carry the same work for a short period so the new one is checked against a known answer rather than against hope. Cutover is last and should be dull, because by then nothing about the new system is a surprise.

Where it goes wrong

Two places, almost always. The first is discovering at cutover that a report everyone depends on was built on a field nobody mapped. The second is cancelling the old subscription before the new system has closed a full billing or reporting cycle, which removes your ability to check one against the other exactly when you need it.

Keep the old subscription running one cycle longer than feels necessary. It is the cheapest insurance in the whole project, and it is the advice we give every client even though it delays our own invoice.

Who does it

We handle migration as part of a fitted build, and the scope is fixed before work starts rather than billed by the hour as surprises appear. The stages are set out in how it works, and the common questions, including what happens to your data during the move, are answered in the FAQ.