Moving an advisory firm off Redtail without losing its history
- Organization
- Registered investment advisory firm
- Built with
- Zoho CRM, Deluge, COQL
The problem
The firm was moving from Redtail to Zoho CRM. The data was the easy part to export and the hard part to trust: households linked to clients, clients linked to accounts, and years of notes that only mattered if you could still tell who wrote them and when.
What I built
- A household-first structure in Zoho: partners, households, clients, and accounts, with the relationships rebuilt after the import changed the original IDs.
- Clean notes. Each note was retitled as date, category, and author, so the history reads the way advisors expect. Nearly 8,000 notes kept their attribution.
- History that doesn't clutter today. Past tasks came in as completed, so nobody opened their task list to years of old reminders.
- Owner and advisor assignments filled in waves, following a priority order of sources, until every household had the right people on it.
- Fixes for the problems migrations always hide: text encoding that garbled imported notes, import tools that mapped values into the wrong fields, and deals missing their household link, repaired in bulk with a script.
What changed
Advisors opened the new CRM to their full client history, correctly linked and readable, instead of a pile of imported rows they had to double-check.