Switching systems feels risky because the horror stories are all about lost history. In practice the risk is concentrated in one decision: what you do with jobs that are mid-flight.
Export before you do anything else
Get your data out of the old system while your account is fully active and your relationship with the vendor is normal. Do this first, before you decide anything.
Export at minimum:
- Customers, contacts, addresses, phone numbers, emails.
- Products, styles, SKUs and your price lists.
- Order history: order number, date, customer, items, quantities, prices.
- Invoices and payment records.
- Artwork files, at full resolution, with a naming scheme you can match to orders.
- Any per-customer agreed pricing.
Artwork is the one that bites. Files often live behind a viewer, and downloading them one at a time after you have cancelled is a miserable week.
Migrate these four
| Data | Migrate? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Customers and contacts | Yes | Everything else references them |
| Products and price lists | Yes | Quoting depends on them |
| Artwork files | Yes | Reorders are worthless without them |
| Closed order history | Yes | Reorders, and answering "what did we do last time" |
| Open orders | No | Finish them where they started |
| Old quotes never accepted | Selectively | Only recent live ones |
| Internal notes and comment threads | No | High effort, near-zero value later |
That last row saves shops a great deal of pointless work. Comment history feels important and is almost never read again.
The parallel fortnight
- Days 1 to 3. Import customers, products and prices. Build your decoration price matrices. Set up your production stages to match how the shop actually works.
- Days 4 to 5. Quote your three most common jobs in the new system and compare the prices against the old ones. Any difference is a configuration error, and finding it now is the whole point.
- Week 2. All new work starts in the new system. Existing work finishes in the old one. Both are open. This is the only genuinely awkward week and it is unavoidable.
- Cutover. When the last old job ships, the old system becomes read-only. Keep the account for a month if you can, then cancel.
Bring your staff in on day one
The most common cause of a failed switchover is not data, it is one person continuing to run their own spreadsheet in parallel. Give everyone their own login on day one, walk their own workflow with them, and be plain that the new system is where the work lives now.
Verify before you cancel
Before the old account closes, check: a sample of customers imported with correct contact details, artwork files open and are the right resolution, historical orders are searchable and reorderable, invoice totals reconcile to your accounts, and your prices produce the same quote as before.
Then cancel, and keep your exports somewhere safe regardless.
Pick your fortnight carefully
Never switch during peak. See managing rush season for why the busy period is the worst possible time to introduce anything new.
Printer's Friend imports customers, products and order history from CSV, and we do the mapping with you in your first onboarding session at no cost. If you are coming from a specific system, the comparison pages each carry a migration note. Coming from a spreadsheet instead? That is a much shorter job: see spreadsheets vs software.