A first-hand guide for UK heating and renewables businesses moving off Commusoft. What the backup export contains, how it maps onto Payaca, what comes across cleanly, what gets rebuilt, and how we sequence the move.
This guide is written from a Commusoft migration we've run end to end, not from a template. A UK heating and renewables business with around 12,000 customers, 13 years of job history and a busy service book moved across, and everything below comes from what we found in their data and what went wrong along the way.
If you're weighing up the move, the useful questions are practical ones. What does Commusoft actually hand over? Where does each thing land in Payaca? What has to be rebuilt? And how do you do it without your engineers or your customers noticing?
Want us to look at your data first?
Send us a Commusoft backup and we'll tell you what's in it, how it would land in Payaca, and what we'd need you to decide. Book a 30-minute walkthrough and we'll map your Commusoft setup.
Heating, plumbing and electrical businesses where renewables are a growing share of the work, running Commusoft today, usually with 10 to 50 staff, a live service book and years of job history they can't afford to lose. If you're mid-way through a contract and planning ahead, this is for you too. The first step (securing your files) is worth doing long before you cut over.
We work from your own data export, not the API. Commusoft produces a full backup of your account into Google Drive, and you download the zip and share it with us. A few things about it shape the whole project.
The first thing we did, before any planning, was pull every file the export pointed at. That was around 560,000 files and close to 280GB, checked file by file. More than 99.9% came back. Most of the small remainder belonged to records the business had already deleted in Commusoft.
Commusoft is built around properties. Payaca is built around a Customer (a person or a company) with linked Customer Contacts and Addresses, and a Project as the unit of work. Here's how the pieces lined up.
Commusoft to Payaca, piece by piece
Properties become Customers. Child properties (a landlord's or a housing provider's individual sites) become Addresses on that Customer, with each site's contacts on its own address. Contacts, emails and phone numbers become Customer Contacts. Customer notes (key safe codes, access details, contact preferences) go into a notes field in a custom fieldset on the Customer. Appliances (make, model, install date) go into an appliances fieldset on the Customer. Jobs and estimates become Projects, each carrying its original Commusoft date and reference. Office tasks become notes on the Project, so the back-and-forth between engineers and the office is still visible. Service reminders become projects in your servicing pipeline, tagged by type and placed in a stage by due date.
We placed imported jobs in a dedicated Commusoft pipeline with three stages: active jobs, completed jobs and estimates. The team then moved each active job into their live pipelines by hand as its engineer came across. That kept thousands of historic projects out of the pipelines the team works every day, and meant nothing imported could set off a stage automation.
A few notes on the left-hand column. We don't rebuild years of invoices inside Payaca. Each migrated customer gets summary figures and their invoice PDFs, and Payaca syncs with Xero or QuickBooks from day one. In our migration the business already had Xero connected, so there was nothing to set up. Direct debit mandates can't move between systems, so customers on a paid plan re-enrol in Payaca. On the price book, the business we moved told us theirs was out of date and had already set up suppliers and materials in Payaca, so we left it behind.
1. Secure the files. A couple of days, done first, before any decisions. Your data is safe while you plan.
2. Assess and scope. We count everything and split customers by when they last had a job. Then you choose your cut-offs: who comes across in full, who comes across as a basic record, and who stays in the archive only. Anyone with a live service reminder or contract comes across in full whatever their last job date, or the service book breaks.
3. Pilot on real records. We loaded three real customers into the live account, chosen to cover the awkward shapes: a landlord with several sites, one with certificates, and one with office tasks and several contacts. The customer checked them side by side against Commusoft. They caught real things, and every catch turned out to be a category rather than a one-off. Once the fixes were in, they signed the samples off.
4. The full run, canary first. From a fresh backup we loaded customers, then the service book, then jobs, then files. Each loader ran on one record first, and we checked the account's automation logs for that record before running the rest. Every imported record was tagged so the whole import is searchable and reversible, and every record kept its Commusoft reference so anything can be traced back.
5. Weekly refreshes while engineers move across. The business moved one or two engineers at a time, so Commusoft stayed in use for weeks. We re-ran the loaders from each new backup. They only add what's new and never duplicate.
6. Open the comms gate. No reminder email or text went to a customer until the business had checked the imported due dates. Once they had, the imported reminders were switched on and started behaving exactly like the ones created in Payaca.
The numbers from that migration, rounded: around 12,000 customers, around 63,000 projects covering every job back to 2013, around 3,700 service reminders, around 64,000 office-task notes and close to 80,000 files on the jobs they belong to. The final history backfill alone loaded around 54,000 completed jobs overnight with zero failures, and at no point did an import send a customer an email or a text.
On time, from the customer's decisions being locked to the service book going live in Payaca took about five weeks, with the engineers moving across over the same period. Securing the files came before that and took a couple of days.
Bring all the job history. We started with completed jobs from the last 12 months to keep the first run lean. Within a couple of weeks an engineer went to a warranty call without seeing the original boiler install, because it was older than the cut-off. Any cut-off just moves that complaint to a different customer, so we backfilled every completed job back to 2013. Now it's our default.
Certificates hide in their own table. Gas safety certificates, warning notices and service records generated in Commusoft aren't stored with the job's attachments. The customer spotted the gap on the first pilot pass, and we fixed it the same day. If your migration plan only reads the attachments table, certificates go missing.
Landlord structures need care. Jobs happen at the child sites, and that's where the contacts and appliances sit. If you only read the parent, a landlord record shows the wrong appliances and loses its tenant contacts. In our migration, around a quarter of the appliance records sat on child sites.
Customers with only estimates are easy to drop. If your cut-off is "had a job", a customer whose only history is a live quote falls through. We missed around 130 of these on the first run, the customer flagged one, and we loaded the rest within a day.
Shared email addresses merge records. One email address can sit on several unrelated records, a landlord or a family sharing an inbox. Match customers on email alone and those records collapse into one. We strip shared addresses before matching and treat any unexpected match as a stop, not a success.
Your live account has automations, and they're watching. A working Payaca account has automations that send emails and texts when projects land in a stage or get a tag. The business we moved was adding new ones every week. Before every load we checked that nothing we were about to create could match one, which is why imports go into a pipeline with no automations and nothing customer-facing switches on until you say so.
Commusoft stays in use for longer than you'd think. With a phased rollout, the office keeps completing services in Commusoft for weeks. Plan for weekly refreshes until you can make Commusoft read-only.
Who does the work
Growth and above include guided onboarding: we map your workflow, migrate your data and train your team, for a one-off £1,500. Current plan prices are on the pricing page.
You don't need to have decided anything to start. The best first step is a recent Commusoft backup. We'll secure the files, count what's there, and come back with a scoping plan: who comes across, where each piece lands, and the handful of decisions only you can make. Book a walkthrough and we'll map your Commusoft setup with you.
Commusoft is a trademark of its owner. Payaca isn't affiliated with or endorsed by Commusoft.
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