Migrating from Another Platform

Guides & Tips
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Migrating from another field-service platform — Housecall Pro, ServiceTitan, Jobber, FieldEdge, anything — is the conversation that determines whether your first 90 days on Exoserva are smooth or chaotic. The platforms differ; the migration playbook doesn’t. This guide is the universal checklist: what to export, what to import first, what to leave behind, and how to keep the lights on while you switch.

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes

Before You Begin

  • Owner or Tenant Administrator role on Exoserva
  • Export access on your old platform (most platforms restrict this to admins)
  • A 2-4 week parallel run window scheduled — you’ll keep the old system live while you stand up the new one
  • (Optional) A migration day blocker on the calendar — pick a low-volume day, ideally Monday morning after a slow weekend

The mental model

A field-service platform stores ~7 categories of data. Migrate them in this order:

  1. Customers — names, contact info, addresses, tags
  2. Properties — service addresses (separate from billing addresses if customer has multiple sites)
  3. Assets / Equipment — installed gear at customer sites with model/serial/install dates
  4. Price Book / Catalog — services and pricing
  5. Open Jobs — anything currently in-progress or scheduled in the future
  6. Open Estimates and Open Invoices — pending pre-job and post-job financial records
  7. Historical jobs/invoices/payments — last 12-24 months for reference, do this last

Migrate top-down. Each layer depends on the one above. Migrating Jobs before Customers leaves orphaned records.

Step-by-step migration playbook

Step 1: Export Customers from old platform

Most platforms offer a CSV export. If yours doesn’t, ask support — every reputable vendor has a data-portability obligation in 2026.

Required columns to capture:

  • Customer name (first + last for individuals, business name for B2B)
  • Primary phone, alternate phone
  • Primary email
  • Billing address (street, city, state, zip)
  • Tags (VIP, commercial, residential, etc.)
  • Notes (any free-text the dispatcher kept)
  • Customer-since date

Save the CSV somewhere durable — Dropbox / Google Drive folder named “Exoserva Migration”.

Step 2: Import Customers into Exoserva

In Exoserva: Customers → Import (CSV upload). The Customers importer expects the headers from Exoserva’s template — download it first, paste your old-platform data into the matching columns, fix mismatches.

The importer flags errors per row (e.g. “row 47: invalid phone number format”) — fix those rows in the CSV, re-import. Most contractors successfully import 90-95% on first try, manually clean up the rest.

Tip: Don’t import duplicate customers. If you’ve been on the old platform 5+ years, your customer list probably has duplicates (“John Smith” + “John Smith Jr” + “smith plumbing”). Run a duplicate-detection pass in a spreadsheet before importing — much easier than de-duping inside Exoserva later.

Step 3: Export and import Properties

Properties are addresses-with-equipment, separate from customers. Some old platforms store them inside the customer record; others have them as separate entities.

Export columns:

  • Customer link (the customer this property belongs to)
  • Service address (street, city, state, zip)
  • Property type (residential / commercial / etc.)
  • Notes (gate codes, pet warnings, parking)
  • Number of units (for multi-unit buildings)

Use Exoserva’s Properties → Import flow. Confirm each property links to the right customer (the importer matches by name + phone).

Full guide: Managing Properties

Step 4: Migrate Assets / Equipment

Assets are equipment installed at a property — AC units, boilers, water heaters. If your old platform tracked them, export and import.

Required columns: property link, type (HVAC / plumbing / etc.), make, model, serial number, install date, warranty expiry, condition.

Many small contractors skip this category in their old platform — if so, you start fresh in Exoserva. Build the asset records as you visit each property over the next 6-12 months.

Full guide: Equipment and Asset Tracking

Step 5: Set up the Price Book

This is where your Migration project actually adds value: re-thinking pricing for your new platform.

Don’t just copy/paste your old prices. The migration is your one annual chance to:

  • Raise prices that have been frozen for 18+ months
  • Add Good-Better-Best tiers (the highest-leverage pricing change)
  • Set proper margins per service
  • Remove services you actually don’t want to do anymore

Use Exoserva’s Price Book template (Setting Up Your Price Book), populate from your old catalog as a starting point, then refine.

Step 6: Decide what to do with Open Jobs

Three options for jobs in flight on the old platform when you cut over:

  1. Complete on old platform — let them finish naturally on the old system, only new jobs go to Exoserva. Cleanest, but requires a 2-4 week parallel run.
  2. Manual recreate in Exoserva — copy the most active 10-20 jobs into Exoserva and continue them there. Good if you have <30 active jobs at cutover.
  3. Bulk import — for >30 active jobs, use the import flow with status mapping (their statuses may not exactly match yours).

Option 1 is the most common. Pick a cutover date 2 weeks out, finish everything in flight on the old platform, only new bookings from cutover-day onward go to Exoserva.

Step 7: Open Estimates and Open Invoices

Pending estimates: import into Exoserva so customers can sign on the new platform’s URL. Mark old-platform pending estimates as canceled/migrated so they don’t accidentally double-book.

Open invoices: this is where it gets sensitive. Three options:

  1. Don’t migrate — let customers pay the old-platform invoice on the old system. Wait for that money to land in your account, then close the old platform. Simplest.
  2. Re-issue in Exoserva — cancel old, send new from Exoserva. Use this if you want everything in one ledger, but expect customer confusion (“which invoice should I pay?”).
  3. Migrate the open invoices, but tag them as “migrated” — they show up in Exoserva but with a note, payment goes through old or new.

Option 1 is the safest for cash flow. Don’t get clever with money during a system migration.

Step 8: Historical data — last 12-24 months

The optional but valuable category. Your historical jobs / invoices / payments / customer history give you context for future customer interactions (“we serviced this furnace 18 months ago, here’s what we replaced”).

Most platforms support a bulk historical export. Exoserva accepts it via the Migration tool (Settings → Data Migration or a similar entry point depending on your tier).

Tip: Don’t migrate every job from 2018. Last 12 months is enough for ~80% of customer-context lookups; last 24 months covers the rest. Pre-2-year-old data is rarely useful in active dispatch.

What to leave behind

Three things contractors try to migrate and shouldn’t:

  1. Outdated pricing — your old platform’s prices are 12+ months old. Use the migration to refresh.
  2. Stale custom fields — every old platform accumulates one-off custom fields (“CustomField5” / “Truck#”). Most are dead weight; pick the ones that matter, drop the rest.
  3. Inactive users — don’t recreate the user account for a tech who left 2 years ago. Mark them inactive in old system, don’t import.

The cutover-day playbook

Pick the day. Tell your team a week in advance. The day-of:

Morning of cutover:

  • Final export from old platform (last delta since the bulk import)
  • Import the delta into Exoserva
  • Switch the AI receptionist phone number to Exoserva (or port it; see Setting Up Voice AI)
  • Send the customer-update email: “Heads up — we’re upgrading our system. You may notice a small change in invoice format and reminder texts. Same team, same service.”

During cutover day:

  • Have someone monitor old + new dashboards
  • Any new lead/inquiry: book in Exoserva
  • Any in-flight job from old platform: finish there, don’t migrate mid-flight
  • Track issues in a shared doc to address tomorrow

End of cutover day:

  • All new bookings on Exoserva
  • Old platform read-only (don’t book new things there)

+1 week:

  • Review issues doc, prioritize fixes
  • Confirm with team that no one is still using old platform for new work

+30 days:

  • Old platform contract close-out (or downgrade to read-only/archival tier if they offer it)
  • Pull final reports from old platform for tax season, save to durable storage

What to expect

Honest expectations for the first 90 days:

  • Week 1: visible chaos. Team learning the new UI, old habits resurface. Customer-facing issues should be zero — that’s the priority.
  • Week 2-4: chaos drops. Productivity dips ~15-25% as muscle memory rebuilds.
  • Month 2: parity with old platform on speed. New features start to add value.
  • Month 3+: productivity surpasses old platform. The reason you migrated starts paying off.

Where to start in Exoserva

Need help? Post in the Tech Support category or contact support@exoserva.com.

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