Choosing the software is the easy part. Most switches stall on the customer list, and on the week when half the crew is on the new system and half is still on paper. This is the order of work we suggest, with the import limits each vendor publishes for itself.
1. Decide what comes over and what stays behind
Bring over what you will use in the next few months: customers with their service addresses and phone numbers, open estimates and jobs, unpaid invoices, and your price list. Jobs closed years ago can stay where they are, as long as you can still find them when someone asks.
2. Keep the old records, paper included
Switching systems does not change how long you have to keep records. The IRS says to keep the records that support your tax return until the period of limitations for that return runs out [1]. In practice:
- 3 years in the ordinary case [1].
- 6 years if you did not report income you should have, and it came to over a quarter of the gross income on the return [1].
- 7 years if you claim a loss from worthless securities or a bad debt deduction [1].
- At least 4 years for employment tax records [1].
- For property such as trucks and equipment, until the period of limitations runs out for the year you sell or dispose of it [1].
If you keep your books electronically, the IRS says "all requirements that apply to hard copy books and records also apply to electronic records" [2]. The IRS lists the supporting documents it means: sales slips, paid bills, invoices, receipts, deposit slips and canceled checks [2]. Your state licensing board may have rules of its own, so check with it too.
3. Clean the customer list before you import it
An import copies your mess as faithfully as your good data. Before you upload anything:
- One row per customer.
- Name, phone, email, street, city, state and ZIP each in their own column.
- Phone numbers written one consistent way.
- Duplicates merged, especially the same customer entered twice with a slightly different name.
- A separate column for the service address when it differs from the billing address.
Then check what your new system accepts:
- Jobber imports clients from a spreadsheet under 2.5MB per file, "approximately 5000 rows", with larger lists split across several files, and only admin users can import [3]. Its job import is still "a Beta feature" [4].
- Housecall Pro accepts CSV, TSV, Excel, XML and TXT files without a template [5], but "fields that are not mapped will be discarded" [5], so map every column you care about before you confirm. It recommends importing from one source only, whichever is most up to date [6].
- ServiceTitan imports a previous system's export during onboarding [7].
- CONSTRUKTR has an import wizard on the web dashboard for customers, jobs, estimates, invoices and your price book, with settings for exports from ServiceTitan, Jobber and Housecall Pro as well as any spreadsheet saved as CSV. The web dashboard comes with Pro and Business and every free trial.
4. Check you can get your data out again
Before you load thousands of customers into anything, check how you would take them with you. Jobber's help center says client export "is available on select plans" and is limited to admins [8]. Housecall Pro lets admins export the customer and job lists [5]. ServiceTitan publishes an "Open Data Pledge" to export customer data to CSV if you leave [9]. In CONSTRUKTR, Settings, Data & Privacy has an export button, Export All Data on the web dashboard and Export Data in the app, which emails a copy of your data to the account email address. Run it once during your trial so you know what you would leave with.
5. Pick a cutover day
Pick a quieter week. From that day, every new job starts in the new system, and jobs already in progress finish where they started, so nothing is entered twice. Have the office put the next two weeks of scheduled work into the new system before the first morning, so the crew's phones show a real day the first time they open them.
6. Get the crew on their phones before the first day
Set up each tech's login and phone the day before, and walk through one practice job together: open it, clock in, take a photo, get a signature, close it. A tech needs a handful of screens, not the whole system, and a practice run surfaces a wrong login or a missing permission before a customer is waiting. In CONSTRUKTR the crew works from the CONSTRUKTR app for iPhone and Android. The iPhone and Android apps are launching on the App Store and Google Play, and the web dashboard works today.
Sources
- IRS: How long should I keep records?, read October 1, 2026.
- IRS: What kind of records should I keep, read October 1, 2026.
- Jobber Help Center: Import clients, read October 1, 2026.
- Jobber Help Center: Import jobs, read October 1, 2026.
- Housecall Pro Help Center: How to import and export jobs and customers, read October 1, 2026.
- Housecall Pro Help Center: What are the options for importing my customers, read October 1, 2026.
- ServiceTitan Help: Export your Housecall Pro data, read October 1, 2026.
- Jobber Help Center: Export client information, read October 1, 2026.
- ServiceTitan Open Data Pledge, read October 1, 2026.