Carry the useful history into the next system.

Plan what moves, how records stay connected and what staff need to use the system after the cutover.

Decide what belongs in the destination

Exports often include duplicate contacts, retired services and attachments nobody has classified. We identify the datasets and their owners before mapping fields. Your organisation decides the business purpose, retention and appropriate access, with its privacy adviser involved where needed.

A scope can cover content inventory, field mapping, character handling, attachment transfer, trial imports, duplicate review and reconciliation. Website work also needs an old-address inventory so useful customer links have a relevant destination. Preserve relationships between records rather than judging success from row counts alone.

Try a complete business case

Use fictional or redacted samples with long names, multiple contacts, revised documents and values that must retain leading zeros. Ask the future operator to find and explain the record in the new system. An import that completes technically may still leave staff without the context needed for their task.

Make the cutover understandable

Agree when edits stop in the old system, how late changes are handled and who can decide to pause or reverse the move. Confirm the next working-day checks and keep recovery steps practical. Avoid moving production data through ad hoc message attachments.

Keep the payer, site and history distinct

Try a fictional Singapore service account, M-38, with one paying organisation and jobs at two units. Its contacts use approved English and Chinese display text, and a closed job links to a drawing that was later corrected. Map the paying relationship, visited site, contact display and document references separately. Decide which records support current work and which belong in restricted history; the responsible adviser determines retention and appropriate access rather than a broad “copy all” instruction.

During the example cutover freeze, the closed job is reopened for another visit. The migration owner must capture that late change, reconnect the corrected drawing and confirm who should receive the new request. A trial that only imports the earlier closed snapshot misses the task the destination now needs to support. Compare that complete case before and after import, including the approved contact text and old reference, then agree whether to pause, reconcile or repeat the move. No national identifier format or universal retention period is invented for the sample.

Bring a safe sample export and one representative case. We can discuss migration as a separate scope or part of application recovery or a website rebuild.