Nobody wants to hand over ten years of customer records to try something new. Here is exactly what comes across, what does not, and how the move actually works.
The honest version. It matters more that you know before you start than after.
Keep your old system readable for a year if you need to look history up. Your Pistonlog history starts building from the first job you write.
Four steps, and nothing is saved until you have seen what it is going to do.
A CSV with the twenty columns already named. You are not guessing what to call anything, and there is no mapping screen to get wrong.
Export customers and vehicles from your old system, then paste the columns across. Only the customer name is required. Everything else is optional, so a thin export still works.
Every row is checked and shown back to you before anything is written, with what will happen to it: a new record, or a match against one you already have.
Confirm with your password and it runs. Up to a thousand rows a file, so a big list goes across in a few batches.
Customers already in Pistonlog are matched on their email address, or on their name together with their phone number. Vehicles are matched on registration. A row that matches an existing record updates it rather than creating a second one.
If a row genuinely matches two existing records, the import stops and tells you which, rather than guessing. You fix the duplicate in Pistonlog and run it again.
Not everyone is switching from software.
You are most of the way there. Your columns go straight into the template, and the preview tells you which rows are not clean before any of it is saved.
Do not type in ten years of cards. Put in the customers who still come to you, and let the rest arrive as they book in. A reg lookup fills in most of a vehicle for you anyway.
It is usually the fear of losing the customer list that keeps a garage on a system it has outgrown. That fear is the only thing this page is here to settle.
What garage owners ask before they move.
No long contract, and you can cancel whenever you like. If you would rather someone looked at your export with you, just ask.