Bring the History. Prove It Arrived.
Every replacement, merger and consolidation runs into the same wall: the data. Years of records in formats nobody chose, duplicated across systems, with the rules that made sense of them undocumented. Migration is the part that decides whether people trust the new system, and it is the part most projects underestimate.
The Symptoms, Before the Diagnosis.
The same customer exists four times
Across the CRM, the accounting package, the field tool and a spreadsheet, with different spellings and different balances. Nobody can say which record is the real one.
History is stuck in a system you want to retire
The old tool cannot go until the past is out of it, and getting the past out is a project nobody has scoped, so the old tool stays for another year.
Two businesses, two stacks
An acquisition or a merger leaves two of everything, and consolidating them keeps being deferred because the data work looks bottomless.
Nobody trusts the new system
A previous migration brought part of the data, got some of it wrong, and nobody verified it — so staff kept using the old system in parallel. That is how a business ends up running both.
Data Migration & Consolidation, in Scope.
Scope is set against your operation, not against this list — but this is the shape of a build in this line.
Extraction from wherever it lives
Databases, exports, spreadsheets, a desktop tool with no export worth the name. Getting the data out is often the hardest technical step and it gets scoped honestly rather than assumed.
Cleansing and deduplication with rules you agree
Duplicates resolved by rules the business signs off on, not by a developer's judgement, with everything that could not be decided automatically surfaced for a person.
Reconciliation you can check
Counts, balances and spot checks comparing the new system against the old, so trust is demonstrated rather than requested. Nobody should have to take migration on faith.
Rehearsal before the real thing
Run against a copy, checked, corrected and run again. By the time it happens for real it has already happened several times without consequence.
We rehearse. A migration that has only been performed once is being performed for the first time at the worst possible moment, so the sequence gets run against copies until the reconciliation comes out clean twice in a row.
And we treat unresolvable records as a business decision rather than a technical one. Which of two conflicting customer records is correct is not a question a developer should answer alone, so those get surfaced, batched and decided by the people who know.
What It Looks Like When It Works.
The new system holds the history, the duplicates are resolved by rules you agreed, and the numbers reconcile against the old system — so the old one can actually be switched off instead of running in parallel for another year.
- We do not migrate data whose quality we have not assessed. A dirty migration is a clean way to make people distrust good software.
- We do not decide which conflicting record is right. We surface the conflicts and implement the rules you choose.
- We do not switch off a source system. That is your call, made after the reconciliation satisfies you, not on our schedule.
Five systems → one
Kilt Contracting · live in production
A general contractor across Edmonton and Calgary consolidated an accumulated stack — spreadsheets, texts and memory — into one operations platform they own, with the operation still running throughout. Client-reported.
Data Migration & Consolidation, Answered.
How Much History Should We Bring?
More than feels necessary, usually. Migrating only current records is the common shortcut, and it is the one that costs you when a dispute, a warranty claim or an audit needs a trail from four years ago. Where volume genuinely is a problem, an archive that stays queryable is the middle path.
What If Our Data Is a Mess?
It generally is, and that is the normal starting condition rather than a disqualifier. The assessment comes first so the cleansing work is scoped honestly instead of discovered halfway through a cutover.
How Do We Know It Migrated Correctly?
You check. Counts, balances and spot checks are produced for you to verify against the old system, because a migration nobody verified is a migration nobody trusts — and staff who do not trust it keep using the old system in parallel.
Start with the operation, not the software
Book a 30-Minute Call.
30 minutes. We map how work moves through your business today, show you where it leaks, and hand you a costed plan — whether you build it with us or not.
Edmonton, Alberta · No commitment · 587-937-6948
Where To Go Next.
Up a level
Systems Integration
Accounting, CRM and field systems wired so nothing is retyped.
More In This Series
Custom API Development
The integration layer, built for the day a vendor changes the schema.
Accounting Integrations
QuickBooks, Sage and Xero wired up so nothing gets entered twice.
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