Before switching CRMs: what data to bring and what to leave

Before you switch CRMs, take what your team will use the following week: active clients with their contacts, your service catalog, the people on your team and the recent work someone still looks up. Leave behind duplicates, prospects nobody has called in years and fields nobody fills in. Whatever you are unsure about, keep as a reference file instead of importing it.

The scene repeats in small firms. Someone exports the old system's database and gets a sheet with nine thousand rows, forty columns and three ways of spelling the same client's name. The temptation is to upload all of it "so nothing gets lost". The result is a new CRM that starts with the same mess that drove the change.

The rule for deciding what data to migrate

For each kind of data, ask one question: will someone open it in the next three months to serve a client, quote, invoice or resolve a request? If yes, it goes in. If no, but the law or your accountant asks you to keep it, it stays archived in its original format. If no on both counts, don't bring it.

This rule leaves out more than you'd expect. The old system or its export still exists, so whatever stays out can be looked up there; the new CRM gets only what your team needs one click away.

What is worth bringing

• Active clients and their contacts. They are the base: every proposal, project or invoice you load later needs to find its client already created.
• Your service catalog with its description and price, because you will use it in the first proposal.
• The people on your team with the role each one has.
• Recent closed work: the projects, tickets, proposals and invoices someone still looks up, with their dates and original number.

Open opportunities are usually few and change every week. It is often cleaner to open them by hand in the new pipeline on launch day, with their owner and next step, than to drag along stages that no longer mean the same thing.

What is worth leaving behind

• Duplicates. Before importing, decide which of the three "Grupo Andino" records is the right one.
• Cold prospects: contacts who came from a trade fair years ago and whom nobody spoke to again.
• Fields nobody fills in or that only made sense in the old system, like statuses you no longer use.
• Loose attachments with no clear client or project. If a document matters, upload it to the record or project it belongs to.

If you want the full order of the migration, with a source inventory and a pilot, it is in switching CRMs without stopping work, and the migration guide helps you write down each decision.

How AgentticCRM's import does it

In data import you upload the file as it came out of your old system: Excel, CSV, Word or PDF, among others. AgentticCRM suggests which field each column matches, you choose which sheets and columns go in, and you review row by row. Each row arrives marked as new, as an update to something that already exists, or with a note of what it is missing. Nothing is saved until you confirm.

Two details help you migrate in parts. Rows from the same company are grouped even when the name is spelled several ways. And each record keeps the identifier it came with, so if you import the same corrected file again, what was already there is updated instead of duplicated.

The order we recommend is clients and contacts first, then the catalog and the team, and closed work last. That history is brought in by a ChatGPT or Claude connected to your organization, with its dates and original status, and loading it sends no email to your clients.

Frequently asked questions

Do I lose anything if I don't migrate the whole history?

No, as long as you keep the old system's export somewhere safe and your team knows where it is. What doesn't go into the CRM is looked up there when needed.

Do I have to clean the file before uploading it?

It helps, especially with duplicates and owners. But you don't need an exact template: you say what each column is, and rows with problems are flagged in the review without holding up the rest.

What happens to the file I upload?

Seven days after the load finishes, the file and the contact details it carried are deleted.