Decision-stage migration guide for UK clean-energy installers leaving HubSpot. What imports cleanly, what doesn't, what HubSpot stays good at, and how to sequence a 4-week cutover without losing project history.
Matt Franklin
You've already had the meeting where someone said the CRM isn't working. You've watched the install team build a parallel spreadsheet. You've reviewed the seat bill. You've decided. This isn't a post about whether to leave HubSpot. This is the post for the week after, when an Ops Manager opens a blank document and writes "migration plan" at the top.
Honest version: the move from HubSpot to a UK install ops platform is not a one-click import. It's a 4-week project. You decide upfront what's a CRM record (moves) and what's an operational record (rebuilds), keep HubSpot running for the marketing layer, and cut over project-by-project rather than big-bang. Done that way, customer-facing service doesn't blink. Done the other way, your install team loses a week to data archaeology.
Prefer to walk through this with us?
We've worked with UK install teams migrating off HubSpot. Book a 30-minute migration walkthrough and we'll map your specific HubSpot setup to a Payaca workspace, including DNO state, MCS doc handover, and BUS voucher tracking.
Here is the part that matters. The records HubSpot models well are also the records that import cleanly. The records HubSpot has never modelled, the operational ones, are the ones you rebuild on the way in.
How HubSpot's data model maps to Payaca's
HubSpot has flat Contacts and Companies. Payaca nests them: a Customer is the entity (person or company), with Customer Contacts and Addresses as linked records, and a Project is the unit of work linked to one Customer. Most B2C migrations turn each HubSpot Contact into a Payaca Customer (with themselves as the primary Customer Contact). B2B migrations turn HubSpot Companies into Customers and the Contacts associated with them into Customer Contacts under the same record.
The rebuilds list is the reason you're migrating in the first place. Those records were never inside HubSpot. They lived in a folder structure, a spreadsheet, a separate compliance portal, or your engineer's head. Migration isn't moving them out of HubSpot. It's moving them into a system where they're fields, not attachments.
The most common pattern we see post-migration isn't "HubSpot is gone." It's "HubSpot is the marketing layer." You keep it for:
That decision usually saves you the upgrade jump from Sales Hub Pro back down to Marketing Hub Starter, and HubSpot's free CRM tier covers the contacts. We had a customer ask us a few months back whether they could "link Payaca customers back to HubSpot for better nurture emails." That's the right instinct. The operational record lives in Payaca. The marketing nurture layer can stay in HubSpot, or move to MailerLite, Brevo, or whatever your marketing person actually uses. The point is the project record stops being a HubSpot deal.
A clean two-system pattern looks like this. Lead enters HubSpot via web form. HubSpot scores and qualifies. Once it's a real opportunity, the contact record is pushed into Payaca via Zapier or the API. From the moment a quote is being built, Payaca is the source of truth. The deal stops being a HubSpot deal and becomes a Payaca project. HubSpot keeps the contact for marketing. Payaca runs the rest. No double-entry; clear handoff.
This is the part of the migration that tends to get underestimated. UK install ops compliance isn't a tab. It's a sequence of stage-gates with regulator deadlines.
DNO connection state. G99 applications have submission states (submitted, under review, approved with conditions, rejected) that the office needs visible against the project before install can be scheduled. G98 installs notify the DNO post-commissioning rather than awaiting approval. In HubSpot, either lifecycle was tracked as a custom dropdown on a deal, an attached PDF, or - most often - a reply email from the DNO sitting in someone's inbox. On Payaca, accounts with the ENA connection application integration enabled get DNO state as a structured field on the project; accounts without it typically track DNO state via a project fieldset. Either way, it lives against the project rather than in someone's inbox.
MCS documentation pack. MCS submissions are not paperwork. They're stage transitions. The pack typically includes the design, system schematics, commissioning certificate, handover, and customer documentation. In HubSpot these lived as files attached to a deal and linked into the MCS Installation Database manually. In Payaca, the same documents are tied to the project record so the same handover doesn't have to be reassembled from a Drive folder every time.
BUS V5 voucher state. For England and Wales heat pump installs, the Boiler Upgrade Scheme V5 (BUS V5) ties the voucher to the MCS-registered install business, the property, the technology, and the redemption window. Voucher state has its own lifecycle. The voucher can't be redeemed if the property's pre-install evidence pack isn't complete. HubSpot has no concept of this. Customers running BUS V5 today typically model voucher state as a project-level fieldset rather than as a separate spreadsheet.
ENA HP/EV form data. Energy Networks Association connection forms for heat pumps and EV chargers have specific data fields (load, manufacturer model, MPAN, install date, sign-off engineer) that don't match HubSpot's contact schema and don't survive a custom-property export cleanly. On Payaca, accounts with the ENA connection application integration enabled get those fields as structured records against the install; accounts without it typically capture the same data as a project fieldset.
Engineer certifications: MIS 3005, F-Gas, MCS 020. Microgeneration Installation Standard MIS 3005-D (design) and MIS 3005-I (installation) determine which jobs each engineer can complete. F-Gas record-keeping is a regulatory requirement on every refrigerant handover. MCS 020 (a) sound calculations decide whether the install qualifies for permitted development on the heat pump side. None of this lives in HubSpot. Customers tracking it today typically maintain a custom fieldset against staff records (and project records for the per-install paperwork), not a colour-coded tab in a shared spreadsheet.
If your team has been keeping any of this in spreadsheets or folder structures, the migration is less about moving data and more about formalising data that was never properly modelled to begin with.
Most install teams in the 10-50 staff range run this as a 4-week project, parallel to live business. Some teams stretch it; others compress it under pressure. Four weeks is the sweet spot for SMB and mid-market: long enough to do this without panic, short enough that nobody loses focus. (Franchise networks and enterprise programmes — multi-region operators, utility-led schemes — run a different shape: staged regional rollouts with a parallel pilot. If you're 100+ install staff, get in touch and we'll walk through the franchise pattern.)
Week 1, decisions and exports. Document the system. Map every HubSpot custom object, custom property, and pipeline stage to either "moves to Payaca," "stays in HubSpot for marketing," or "doesn't move, was never useful." Run the HubSpot exports: Contacts, Companies, Deals, Notes, Activity. Most teams find a meaningful chunk of their custom properties were unused or duplicate.
Week 2, import and reconciliation. Customer data goes in via Payaca's CSV import for self-serve migrations, or via the REST API or MCP server for larger imports — preserves more of the relationship data and avoids the one-row-per-customer ceiling that CSV imposes. On Growth-tier accounts, this is the step Payaca's onboarding team runs for you: relationships, custom-field mappings, and document attachments handled end-to-end via the API. Deal records become Payaca projects, with the historical pipeline stage preserved as a status note. This is the week your migration lead confirms the imports landed, runs sample queries, and signs off that "the customer who paid us in February is now in Payaca with February's invoice attached."
Week 3, workflow build. This is the week that usually surprises people. You're not rebuilding HubSpot in Payaca. You're rebuilding the workflows you couldn't build in HubSpot. DNO submission tracking, MCS document handovers, finance approval steps, commissioning sign-off. If your team has been running automations in HubSpot, audit each one: most don't survive because they were patching a data-model gap that doesn't exist on the other side.
Week 4, cutover. New work starts in Payaca. In-flight projects either finish in HubSpot if they're past install or move to Payaca if they're pre-install. We recommend a project-by-project cutover, not a big-bang. The two systems run in parallel for the back end of week 4 while the team gets confident. By Friday afternoon, HubSpot stops being the source of truth for new operational work.
By the end of week 4 the team is on Payaca. HubSpot is still running for marketing. The team isn't double-keying.
Cutover day is where most migrations either go cleanly or unravel.
We will tell you not to do this if:
If none of those apply, and you've been doing the spreadsheet shuffle for more than 6 months, you've already paid the cost of staying. The migration is just where you stop paying it.
The metric we ask teams to track 90 days post-migration is not "did we save money on CRM seats." It's "how many projects went from accepted-proposal to commissioning without a single piece of data being re-typed." The gap between that number on month one and that number on month three tells you whether the migration worked.
Pricing-wise, teams that consolidate often find their effective software bill goes down because the field-app licences, the separate scheduling tool, and the parallel ops spreadsheet all collapse into the operational platform. Specifics depend on team size and tier. We publish current pricing on the pricing page rather than in a blog post, because it changes.
If you're at the "blank document with 'migration plan' at the top" stage, book a walkthrough and we'll talk through your specific HubSpot setup. We've seen it before, the patterns repeat, and you don't need to invent the playbook on your own.
See how Payaca helps clean tech installers save time and grow their business.
Book a demo
Decision-stage migration guide for US clean-energy installers leaving HubSpot. What imports cleanly, what doesn't, what HubSpot stays good at, and how to sequence a 4-week cutover without losing project history or AHJ permit state.
Commissioning is where heat pump jobs get signed off - and where margin and customer satisfaction most often leak. A practical playbook for growing UK installers on MIS 3005, the MCS Installation Database, BUS V5 voucher applications and redemption, and clean handover.
A practical breakdown of where heat pump installer margin is won and lost - from survey to commissioning. Covers the real cost of quoting, MCS admin, on-site overruns, and how growing installers protect 20%+ margins as volume scales.