Nobody switches CRMs because they're having a great time. You switch because renewals are slipping through the cracks, the reporting is guesswork, or you're paying for seats your team quietly stopped logging into. Then the second thought arrives — the one that keeps a lot of advisers stuck where they are: what happens to fifteen years of client history when I pull the plug?
That fear is reasonable. It's also overblown. Moving off TAP, AdviserLogic, a tangle of spreadsheets, or whatever you're running now is mostly a logistics job, not a leap of faith — provided you treat the data carefully and go in with a plan. Here's the honest field guide: what you export, what gets mapped on the way in, and what the first week actually feels like.
Start with the export, not the import
The single biggest predictor of a smooth migration is the quality of what comes out of your old system. Before you touch anything new, get a full export — and get it early, while you still have an active login. Most CRMs let you pull a CSV of contacts, policies and notes; some make you ask support, which can take a few days, so request it the moment you've decided to move.
Pull more than you think you need. It's far easier to ignore a column than to re-export once your subscription has lapsed. At minimum, get each of these in a format you can open and eyeball:
- Client and contact records — names, dates of birth, contact details, and relationship links (partners, dependants, business entities)
- The policy register — insurer, product type, policy number, sum insured, premium, commencement and renewal dates, and status
- Activity and file notes — the running history of who said what and when, which is the part you can never recreate
- Open tasks and pipeline items, so nothing in flight gets dropped
- Custom fields and tags you've leaned on — adviser splits, lead source, review cycles
Open the files before you send them anywhere. Five minutes scrolling a spreadsheet surfaces the usual gremlins: dates in three formats, premiums with stray dollar signs, a 'Status' column someone's been free-typing into. You don't have to fix it all yourself — you just need to know it's there, so it gets handled rather than silently imported.
What maps cleanly, and what needs a human eye
Once the export is in hand, the mapping begins — lining up each column in your old data against the right field in AdviserDesk. The structured, predictable stuff is the easy part. Client records, the policy register, renewal dates and premiums slot in cleanly because they live in consistent fields almost everywhere. The obvious messes — date formats, duplicated contacts, insurer names spelt four ways over the years — get normalised on the way in.
The parts that need a conversation are the ones unique to how you run your practice. Custom fields rarely have a one-to-one home in a new system, so you decide whether each one becomes a proper structured field, a tag, or a note. Free-text status columns get translated into a clean, consistent set. And your activity notes come across as history attached to the right client, so the story of each relationship is intact from day one rather than starting from a blank page.
One word on the data itself: a migration moves a pile of sensitive client information from one place to another, so treat it as a privacy moment. Handle the export files the way you'd handle anything else carrying client data — don't leave them in a shared Downloads folder or email them around unencrypted. For chapter and verse on your obligations, your licensee or compliance adviser is the right port of call.
The 48-hour window, hour by hour
The 'two days' framing isn't a gimmick — it's roughly how long the active part takes when the export is clean. It's not 48 hours of you chained to a desk; it's a short, bounded changeover with clear checkpoints. Here's the shape of it.
Day one is data day. You send the export, the mapping runs, and a draft of your data lands in a working version of AdviserDesk so you can look at it before anything's final. This is the step most people skip elsewhere, and it's the important one: check a handful of your own clients — a simple single-policy case and your most complicated multi-policy family — and confirm the policies, dates and notes look right. If something's off, this is the cheap moment to catch it.
Day two is sign-off and switch. Anything the review surfaced gets corrected, the final dataset loads, and you turn on the things you'll actually use — your renewal pipeline, review reminders, templates. By the end you're working in AdviserDesk for real. Don't cancel the old subscription on day two; keep it parked and read-only for a few weeks until you're certain nothing's missing. One more month's fee is trivial against the peace of mind.
Your first week on the new system
Migration day ends and the real adjustment begins, which is mostly muscle memory. Plan for your output to dip slightly for a few days — that's not the software, that's you learning where the buttons live. The advisers who settle in fastest treat the first week as a deliberate shakedown rather than business as usual at full noise.
A few habits make that week painless:
- Work a real client end to end on day one — open the record, log a note, set a task, send something — so the full loop is familiar before it matters under pressure
- Check your renewal pipeline against what you know is coming this month; if the dates line up, your most important data made the trip
- Don't rebuild every workflow at once. Get the daily 80% solid, then add the clever automations once you trust the basics
- Keep the old system open in another tab for a fortnight as a reference, then close it for good
By the end of week one the question quietly flips. You stop asking 'did everything come across?' and start asking 'why didn't I do this sooner?' — the moment a migration stops being a project and just becomes how you work.
None of this is heroic. A switch goes well when the export is thorough, the messy fields get a human decision, and you keep the old system on standby until the new one has earned your trust. Do those three things and the scary part — fifteen years of client history — turns out to be the part that travels best.