Moving from spreadsheets to a CRM without losing a decade of history

Spreadsheets are not the enemy — undocumented spreadsheets are. Here is how to move to a CRM while preserving what your team actually relies on.

Inventory every sheet first

List every file that influences revenue: the master client list, the quotes tracker, the pipeline sheet, the personal file on someone's desktop. Note owner, update frequency and what decision it feeds. Anything not on this list will resurface as a shadow process later.

Decide the target structure before touching data

Companies, contacts, deals, and — if your business needs it — a custom object for projects, shipments, properties or vessels. Map every spreadsheet column to a destination field or explicitly retire it. Roughly a third of columns usually deserve retirement.

Clean in the spreadsheet, not in the CRM

Deduplicate by email and by normalised company name. Standardise countries, currencies and phone formats. Split combined fields (name and role in one cell, city and country in one cell). Fill or drop mandatory fields.

Import in dependency order

Companies first, then contacts with their company association, then deals with amounts, currency, stage and close date, then activities and notes. Verify counts and spot-check associations after each step. Never import everything in one file.

Preserve history deliberately

Historic won deals give you baseline conversion and cycle time. Import them with real close dates so your first CRM reports are not empty. Old open deals from three years ago should be closed lost, not imported as pipeline.

Turn off the spreadsheets

Adoption fails when the old file stays editable. Set a hard cutover date, make the sheets read-only, and move the reporting the team cares about into CRM dashboards before that date, not after.

What good looks like after 30 days

Every new enquiry is created in the CRM automatically, no one asks "which file is current", and the weekly revenue meeting runs from one dashboard. That is the whole point of the migration.