The part nobody wants to talk about.
Every practice-management vendor says migration is easy. What a firm actually wants to know is which parts are not, and how long the bad week is.
So here is the honest version: what comes across, what does not, and the order that makes it survivable.
What comes across
Your client roster
Upload the CSV your current system exports. Column presets exist for TaxDome, Canopy, Drake, UltraTax and Lacerte, and the mapper auto-detects headers whatever the source — "Client Name", "Company", "Customer" and "Business Name" all resolve to the same field.
Contacts, entities and EINs
Legal names, entity types, EINs, addresses and contact people come across on the same file, mapped in the same step.
Open receivables
Invoices import in a batch and match to the clients you just created, so the balances your firm is chasing arrive with the roster rather than being re-keyed.
Your document archive
Export it to a folder, point the desktop agent at that folder, and it files what it finds. Identity is the folder path — the agent walks up to the client folder and reads the structure below it against your rules, so a well-organized archive stays organized.
Everything your tax software exports, from then on
The same agent keeps watching. Returns and e-file authorizations file themselves from Drake, Lacerte, ProSeries, UltraTax CS and CCH Axcess exports without anyone dragging a file.
What does not
A firm that finds this out in week two has been mis-sold. Better to read it now and decide.
Workflow templates
Your pipelines, statuses and task templates are rebuilt here rather than imported. For most firms this is half a day and worth doing deliberately — the templates you carry over are usually the ones you had stopped liking.
Historical time entries and WIP
Time starts fresh. Firms typically bill out the old system’s WIP there and start clean here, which is cleaner than reconciling two ledgers mid-season.
Message history
Past client threads stay in the system that holds them. New client email runs on your own sending domain from day one.
Anything your old vendor will not export
We can only import what you can get out. Ask them for a full export before you sign anything with us — that is a reasonable request, and the answer tells you something either way.
The order that works
Each step depends on the one above it. Firms that go badly are almost always firms that invited clients before the roster was clean.
Import the roster first
Everything else attaches to a client, so the roster comes first. Upload, map, review duplicates, create.
Review what the matcher flagged
Rows with no candidate default to create. Rows that look like someone already in the system default to skip and are counted for you before you commit, so a near-match is never quietly turned into a second copy of a client you already have.
Point the agent at your archive
Run it once over the exported folder to bring history in, then leave it watching your tax software’s export folders.
Rebuild your pipelines
One board per kind of work, statuses named the way your firm talks. This is the step worth doing slowly.
Invite clients to the portal
In waves, not all at once. Bulk invite exists, but the firms who go smoothly start with the clients they talk to most.
Do it out of season
The single best predictor of a smooth switch is the month you do it in. May through October, the roster import and the archive run are an afternoon and the pipelines are an evening. In February they are neither.
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