PSA Migration: What Nobody Tells You Before You Switch

Somewhere right now, an MSP owner is sitting in a demo for a new PSA platform and thinking "this looks so much better than what we have." And they're probably right — it does look better. The interface is cleaner, the pricing is lower, the sales rep is saying all the right things about easy migration and seamless onboarding.

What that sales rep isn't telling them — because it's not their job to — is that PSA migration is one of the most disruptive operational projects an MSP can undertake, and the difference between a successful migration and a disaster comes down to planning that nobody finds exciting.

I've handled enough of these to know where the landmines are. Here's what I wish someone had told every MSP owner before they signed the migration contract.

It will take longer than you think

Double whatever estimate you have in your head right now. That's closer to reality.

A reasonable timeline for a PSA migration — from the moment you commit to the moment your team is productively working in the new system — is 8 to 16 weeks. Not 2 weeks. Not 30 days. Two to four months, minimum, for a properly planned migration with data integrity checks, integration rewiring, team training, and a supported cutover.

The 2-week migration timeline some vendors quote covers the technical data import. It doesn't cover the configuration build in the new platform (which should happen before any data migrates). It doesn't cover integration reconnection. It doesn't cover team training. It doesn't cover the 2–4 weeks of reduced productivity while your team learns the new system.

I'd rather set this expectation up front and have the timeline come in under estimate than promise a fast migration and spend three months dealing with fallout.

The productivity dip is real and unavoidable

Plan for 30–40% reduced team efficiency for the first 2–4 weeks after cutover. That's not pessimism. That's what happens when people who have been using one system for years switch to a different system overnight.

Every keyboard shortcut they memorized is gone. Every workflow they had muscle memory for works differently. Every screen they navigated automatically now requires conscious thought. Your fastest tech becomes a beginner again, at least for a few weeks.

You can minimize this with good training — and you should invest heavily in training — but you can't eliminate it. Build the productivity dip into your planning. Maybe don't schedule the cutover the same week as your biggest client's infrastructure refresh.

Not everything should migrate

This is the conversation nobody wants to have, and it's one of the most important decisions in the entire migration.

Your current PSA has years of data: tickets, time entries, client history, notes, configurations, and more. The instinct is to migrate everything, because it feels irresponsible to leave data behind. But migrating everything is often worse than migrating selectively.

Here's why: the data in your old PSA accumulated under a configuration structure that's about to become irrelevant. Ticket statuses, priorities, categories, custom fields — all of that was specific to the old platform's configuration. When you dump that data into a new system with a different configuration structure, the historical context degrades. Old tickets reference statuses that don't exist in the new system. Custom field data maps to fields with different names or doesn't map at all.

What I typically recommend migrating:

Always migrate: Active client records, contacts, current configurations/assets, open tickets, current agreements.

Selectively migrate: Ticket history from the past 12–24 months (useful for reference, not worth going back further), time entry data for open tickets.

Consider leaving behind: Ticket history older than 24 months (archive it as a data export instead), completed project data, closed agreements, decommissioned configurations.

The old system doesn't disappear. You can keep read-only access for historical lookups. There's no reason to migrate five years of closed ticket history into a new platform where it'll just take up space and complicate the data model.

Your integrations will break. All of them.

Every integration your current PSA connects to — RMM, accounting, documentation, email parsing, monitoring, vendor portals, automation platforms — needs to be reconnected to the new PSA. Every. Single. One.

Some will have native integrations on the new platform. Great, those are straightforward. Some will need to be rebuilt through the new platform's API. Some may not have any integration path at all on the new platform, which means you're either building a custom bridge, finding an alternative tool, or accepting a manual process.

The integration inventory and rewiring plan is one of the first things I build during migration planning. For each integration, I document: what it does, what data flows between systems, which direction, how it's configured, and what the equivalent looks like on the target platform.

This inventory almost always surfaces surprises. The RMM integration that "just works" on ConnectWise might require custom API work on HaloPSA. The accounting sync might need different field mappings. The email parser might handle threading differently.

Plan for integration work to take 1–3 weeks of the migration timeline, and build in testing time for each integration before cutover.

ConnectWise makes leaving harder than it should be

I need to address this directly because it affects a lot of MSPs considering a move away from ConnectWise.

ConnectWise updated their terms of service to restrict using their API to export data to competing PSA platforms. The practical impact of this is that some of the automated migration paths that used to work — pull data from ConnectWise via API, push it into HaloPSA — are now in a legal gray area.

This doesn't make migration impossible. It does make it more complicated. There are workarounds — direct database exports, ConnectWise's own data export tools, and other approaches that don't involve the restricted API endpoints — but it adds friction and planning complexity to the process.

If you're considering a ConnectWise migration, factor this into your timeline and budget. And make sure whoever is handling your migration is aware of these restrictions and has a tested approach for working within them.

Training is not optional and not a one-day thing

The MSP owners who treat training as "we'll do a half-day walkthrough and figure the rest out as we go" are the ones calling me six weeks later because their team is struggling and ticket resolution times have doubled.

Effective PSA training for a migration needs to be:

Role-specific. Your technicians, dispatchers, service managers, and billing team all use the PSA differently. Training them all together in one generic session doesn't work. Techs need to know ticket workflow. Dispatchers need to know routing and scheduling. Billing needs to know agreement management and invoice generation. Managers need to know reporting.

Hands-on. Reading documentation or watching videos is prep work, not training. Real training involves people doing their actual job tasks in the new system with someone available to answer questions in real time.

Ongoing. The first training session is the introduction. The real learning happens in the first two weeks of production use, when people hit the edge cases and scenarios that no training session covers. Having someone available — either internal or external — to field questions during that window is essential.

Budget at least one full day of role-specific training before cutover, and two weeks of on-call support after cutover. The productivity recovery happens faster when people aren't struggling alone.

The cutover plan matters more than you think

The actual cutover — the moment you switch from old system to new system — needs a written plan that everyone involved has reviewed before the day arrives.

The plan should cover: when the old system goes read-only, when the new system goes live, who is responsible for each integration switchover, what the rollback plan is if something goes catastrophically wrong, who the point of contact is for technical issues during cutover, and how clients will be notified about any service disruptions.

I prefer Friday evening cutovers for PSA migrations. It gives you the weekend to catch and fix issues before Monday morning when the full team comes online and tickets start flowing. If something goes seriously wrong, you have a 48-hour buffer before it impacts daily operations.

When migration is worth it — and when it isn't

Migration is worth it when the total cost of ownership on your current platform — license fees plus productivity losses plus workaround costs plus frustration — clearly exceeds the cost of migration plus the new platform's TCO, and when your current platform's trajectory doesn't align with where your business is going.

Migration is not worth it when your frustration is primarily with your configuration rather than the platform itself, when the integration ecosystem on the target platform doesn't cover your critical tools, or when the timing conflicts with other major operational changes your MSP is going through.

I've talked MSPs out of migrations. Sometimes the honest answer is "you don't need a new PSA, you need someone to fix the one you have." That's not a fun answer to give when someone is excited about a shiny new platform, but it's the right answer when it saves them $30,000 and four months of disruption.

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Considering a migration? Book a discovery call and I'll tell you whether it makes sense for your situation — or whether optimization would get you where you want to go for less.