Switching Job Management Software

Get your data out before you cancel anything

This is the one irreversible step in the whole process. The day your subscription lapses, most systems lock you out of the account, and a locked account is the same as no data at all. Do the export while everything still works, even the parts you're sure you'll never need.

• Clients and contacts — names, addresses, phone, email, and any site addresses that differ from the billing one.
• Your price list and line items — the raw list, in a spreadsheet format if it's offered.
• Job history — every completed job, however it comes out. Even a folder of PDFs beats nothing.
• Quotes and invoices — particularly anything still open or unpaid.
• Photos and attachments — these are almost never included in a standard export and are the thing tradies most regret losing.
• Recurring and maintenance schedules — what's due, for whom, and when.
• Custom forms, certificates and checklists you've built up over the years.
• Supplier details and any pricing files you've loaded in.

Keep the old subscription running for one billing cycle past your cutover. It's the cheapest insurance you'll ever buy, and it's the difference between a calm phone call about a job from 2023 and an awkward one.

What migrates, what gets retyped, what you let go

Expectations are where switches go wrong. Almost nobody moves everything across, and almost nobody needs to. Here's the realistic picture.

That last-but-one row takes most of the pressure off. Your invoices, payments and GST already live in Xero or MYOB, which is the record that matters for the books. What you're moving is the operating side of the business, not its financial history.

Rebuild your rate library first, and clean it while you're there

Your saved rates and line items are the asset that makes quoting take ten minutes instead of an evening. They're also, in most systems, the hardest thing to import cleanly, because every tool structures kits, assemblies, labour and materials differently.

Treat that as an opportunity rather than a chore. A price list that's been accumulating for years is full of items you priced once in 2019 and never used again, and dragging all of it into a new system just makes the search results worse.

1. Pull your last twenty to thirty jobs. Not your whole price list — your actual recent work. The lines that appear again and again across those jobs are the ones worth having.
2. Reprice every one of them. Check current supplier cost and your current labour rate as you enter each item. You're rebuilding anyway, so there's no cheaper time to do this.
3. Build your five most common jobs as kits. Whatever the new system calls them — kits, templates, assemblies — set up the handful of jobs you quote constantly so they come out as a group rather than line by line.
4. Leave the rest in the archive. If an item hasn't been on a quote in two years, you can add it back the day you need it. It takes a minute, and it stops the library becoming unsearchable.

Reconnecting Xero or MYOB without making a mess

This is where a switch does real damage if it's rushed, because the errors land in your books rather than in your job list — and your bookkeeper finds them, not you.

• Disconnect the old system first. Two job systems connected to one accounting file will happily create two of everything.
• Check contact matching. The new system will try to match your clients to existing contacts. Slightly different spellings create duplicate contacts, and duplicate contacts split a client's payment history.
• Map the account codes deliberately. Income, materials and subcontractor codes should land where they already land. Don't accept the defaults without looking.
• Confirm GST treatment on both a standard invoice and any GST-free line you use, before volume goes through.
• Check tracking categories if you use them, so job or site reporting doesn't quietly stop working.
• Push one real invoice end to end and look at what actually arrives in Xero or MYOB — not a test invoice for a dollar, a genuine one.

When to switch, and how long to run both

There is no perfect time, but there are clearly bad ones. Switching mid-build on your biggest job of the year, or in the fortnight before Christmas, turns a manageable fortnight of friction into a genuine problem.

• Pick the quietest stretch in your year, whenever that falls for your trade.
• Line the cutover up with the start of a month or a quarter so the accounting side has a clean break.
• Avoid end of financial year and the weeks either side of it, when your accountant has no time for you.
• Don't switch in the same month you're hiring, moving premises or taking on a big new client. One disruption at a time.
• Give yourself a fortnight of overlap with the old system still accessible, then a month of read-only access on top.

Running both systems in parallel is necessary, but it has to be time-boxed. The rule that works: from cutover day, every new job starts in the new system, and jobs already underway finish where they started. Set the end date at the length of your longest live job plus your payment terms, and hold to it.

The switch, in order

1. Write down what's actually broken. Be specific about what the current system does badly — quoting speed, the field app, the accounting sync, the cost per seat. That list is what you test the new one against during its trial, and it stops you buying the same problem with a different logo.
2. Trial the new one on real jobs. Two or three genuine jobs, quoted, scheduled, varied and invoiced end to end, on a phone on site. A fortnight of that tells you more than a month of demos.
3. Export everything from the old system. Clients, price list, job history, photos, open quotes, schedules. Do it before you give notice, and store it somewhere that isn't one laptop.
4. Set the new system up properly. Clients imported, rate library rebuilt and repriced, terms and templates written, users and permissions set. This is the work that decides whether the switch sticks.
5. Connect the accounting, then test it. Old system disconnected first, codes and GST mapped deliberately, one real invoice run end to end and checked.
6. Cut over on a named date. New jobs in the new system from that morning. Tell the crew the date well in advance and train them before it, not after.
7. Cancel the old subscription one cycle later. Once you've been through a full month — including invoicing and a payment run — without needing the old system, close it down.

Frequently asked questions