Switching systems feels risky because the horror stories are all about lost history. In practice the risk is concentrated in one decision: what you do with jobs that are mid-flight.
Export before you do anything else
Get your data out of the old system while your account is fully active and your relationship with the vendor is normal. Do this first, before you decide anything.
Export at minimum:
- Customers, contacts, addresses, phone numbers, emails.
- Products, styles, SKUs and your price lists.
- Order history: order number, date, customer, items, quantities, prices.
- Invoices and payment records.
- Artwork files, at full resolution, with a naming scheme you can match to orders.
- Any per-customer agreed pricing.
Artwork is the one that bites. Files often live behind a viewer, and downloading them one at a time after you have cancelled is a miserable week.
Migrate these four
| Data | Migrate? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Customers and contacts | Yes | Everything else references them |
| Products and price lists | Yes | Quoting depends on them |
| Artwork files | Yes | Reorders are worthless without them |
| Closed order history | Yes | Reorders, and answering "what did we do last time" |
| Open orders | No | Finish them where they started |
| Old quotes never accepted | Selectively | Only recent live ones |
| Internal notes and comment threads | No | High effort, near-zero value later |
That last row saves shops a great deal of pointless work. Comment history feels important and is almost never read again.
The parallel fortnight
- Days 1 to 3. Import customers, products and prices. Build your decoration price matrices. Set up your production stages to match how the shop actually works.
- Days 4 to 5. Quote your three most common jobs in the new system and compare the prices against the old ones. Any difference is a configuration error, and finding it now is the whole point.
- Week 2. All new work starts in the new system. Existing work finishes in the old one. Both are open. This is the only genuinely awkward week and it is unavoidable.
- Cutover. When the last old job ships, the old system becomes read-only. Keep the account for a month if you can, then cancel.
Bring your staff in on day one
The most common cause of a failed switchover is not data, it is one person continuing to run their own spreadsheet in parallel. Give everyone their own login on day one, walk their own workflow with them, and be plain that the new system is where the work lives now.
Verify before you cancel
Before the old account closes, check: a sample of customers imported with correct contact details, artwork files open and are the right resolution, historical orders are searchable and reorderable, invoice totals reconcile to your accounts, and your prices produce the same quote as before.
Then cancel, and keep your exports somewhere safe regardless.
Pick your fortnight carefully
Never switch during peak. See managing rush season for why the busy period is the worst possible time to introduce anything new.
A cutover checklist you can work through
The order matters more than the speed. Each step should be finished before the next begins.
| Step | Done when |
|---|---|
| Full export taken from the old system | Files on your own storage, verified openable |
| Customers and contacts imported | Spot-check 10 records against the old system |
| Price data and agreements rebuilt | Your three most common jobs quote to the same price as before |
| Artwork and approved proofs attached | Your top 20 repeat customers have their designs |
| Closed order history imported | A two-year-old reorder can be found and quoted |
| Staff trained on their own screen | Each person has done their own task once, unaided |
| Cutover date announced internally | Everyone knows which system new work goes into |
| Old system read-only, not cancelled | Kept for a full quarter |
The last line is the one people skip and regret. Keep read-only access through at least one full billing and reporting cycle, because the questions you cannot anticipate all arrive in the first quarter.
Set up the things that only work if you start on day one
Some data is historical and can be imported later. Some only exists if you begin capturing it at the cutover, and every week you delay is a week you never get back.
- Labour on jobs. Set your team's labour rates and start clocking on from day one. A month of clocked hours gives you your first honest margin after labour figures; a month of good intentions gives you nothing. See time tracking and job costing.
- Commission rates. If anyone sells on commission, set their rate and assign reps to orders from the start, so the first payroll run in the new system is calculated rather than reconstructed.
- Stage discipline. Decide the stages before you start and record every change from the first job. Stage timings are only useful as a series.
- Approval records. Every proof through the new approval flow, from the first day, so the audit trail has no gap in it.
Train by task, not by tour
A walkthrough of every screen teaches nobody anything. Train each person on the two or three things they will do twenty times a day, have them do it unaided once with a real job, and stop.
The person at the press needs one screen and a scanner. The person quoting needs the quote form and the customer record. The person invoicing needs dispatch to invoice. Anything beyond each person's own path can wait until they ask, and they will ask in week two rather than week one.
Pick the fortnight, and protect it
Never cut over into your peak. The best window is immediately after a busy period, when volume drops but the team is still in rhythm and last season's jobs are fresh enough to be worth importing carefully. Block the fortnight in the calendar, decline the large speculative job that lands in the middle of it, and accept that week one is slower. That is the whole cost of the migration, and it is paid once.
Printer's Friend imports customers, products and order history from CSV, and we do the mapping with you in your first onboarding session at no cost. If you are coming from a specific system, the comparison pages each carry a migration note. Coming from a spreadsheet instead? That is a much shorter job: see spreadsheets vs software.