Moving your book to a new CRM without losing the details that matter

Ask an advisor why they're still on a CRM they've outgrown, and the honest answer is rarely "I love it." It's "I can't face the move." A book that took a decade to build — the KYC notes, the beneficiary quirks, the "call before March" reminders — feels impossible to lift and shift without something important falling on the floor.

That fear is reasonable. Most migrations do lose things. But the losses come from a handful of predictable places, and every one of them is avoidable.

Where migrations actually go wrong

• Silent field mismatches. Your old system called it "Client Since." The new one wants "Relationship Start Date." A naive import drops the column and nobody notices until an advisor goes looking for it.
• Flattened relationships. Spouses, dependants, powers of attorney and trusted contacts get imported as a pile of separate contacts, and the shape of the household — the thing your advice actually revolves around — is gone.
• No dry run. The import goes straight into the live system. When something is wrong, there's no clean way back, so people live with the mess.

How we move a book on Advirra

We treat a migration as a reviewable process, not a one-shot upload.

We map your fields before anything imports. Advirra ships with source profiles for the systems advisors actually leave — spreadsheets, Wealthbox, Redtail, Maximizer — so the columns line up on the first pass, and anything unusual gets mapped explicitly rather than dropped.

Everything lands in a staging area first. You see exactly what will be created and changed — household by household, person by person — before a single record touches your live book. If the mapping is wrong, you fix it and re-run. Nothing is committed until it reviews clean, and a commit can be rolled back if you spot something after.

Households stay households. Related people import as one household with their relationships intact, so the book arrives shaped the way you actually work — not as ten thousand loose contacts you have to re-assemble by hand.

A real person runs it with you. Every firm that joins Advirra is onboarded by a human who migrates the book, sets up intake forms and workflows, and stays reachable during business hours. The practices we build for don't have an IT department, and moving CRMs shouldn't require one.

The test of a good migration

You should be able to open your ten most complicated households the day after the move and find everything where it belongs — the joint accounts, the executor on file, the note from last quarter. If you can, the migration worked. If you can't, it wasn't finished.

That's the bar we hold ourselves to. If you're weighing a move and dreading the data, book a walkthrough — we'll show you the staging step on your own sample data first, so you can see exactly what arrives before you commit to anything.