Operational Legacy Data Migration
Moving your decade-old customer and supplier records to a modern cloud database is tedious. We write custom scripts to clean your messy historical data and safely move it over. We make sure no invoices or customer addresses are lost in the process. After the migration, we run a hands-on training workshop with your office staff to build confidence with the new tools.
How we pull your historical data out of old local drives
Older manufacturing hubs in the West Midlands often run on local databases set up in 2011 or even 2006. If your office team is still clicking through a slow SQL Server 2008 setup or a shared Excel spreadsheet with 9,412 rows, daily lookups take too much time. We extract these records directly from your local hardware without breaking your live setups. Our team works with your existing IT setup to make sure every line of transaction history is safely backed up before we touch a single line of code.
Python cleaning scripts to remove duplicates and errors
Before we move any records to a new system, we write Python scripts to find duplicate files and formatting errors. In a migration we completed in November 2024 for a haulage firm near Coventry, we found 1,412 duplicate supplier entries and 347 corrupted UK postcodes. We fix these errors on our local staging server first. This means your new database starts clean, with correct addresses and consolidated customer histories instead of years of clerical clutter.
Moving your data overnight to prevent operational downtime
We use robust SQL databases or flexible Airtable setups depending on what your office staff actually prefer to use daily. Your business cannot pause for a database upgrade, so we run the migration process overnight on a Saturday, starting at 20:00 and finishing by 04:30 on Sunday morning. When your team arrives on Monday morning, they log into a modern system where every historical invoice is searchable in under two seconds.
Practical on-site training for your desk staff
Software is only useful if your staff actually use it. We do not just email you a PDF guide or a password reset link. We run a 3-hour, face-to-face workshop at your Birmingham office for up to 7 of your administrators. We walk through daily tasks like printing a supplier dispatch note or pulling up a 2019 invoice, and we leave behind a laminated, 1-page quick-reference sheet for every desk to prevent post-launch panic.
What we do and do not migrate
To be upfront, we do not migrate highly proprietary, custom mainframe software built in the 1980s. We focus on Windows-based databases, Sage backup files, and messy Excel systems. Our typical migration project takes exactly 18 business days from our initial data check to the final Monday morning hand-off. If you want to see how we handle your specific software setup, you can book a 20-minute phone consultation with our database developer to discuss your file formats.