About

The direction nobody documents

Every piece of writing about business software is aimed at the moment before you buy. Almost none of it is aimed at the moment after you have decided to leave, which is when the awkward questions start:

• If we import our Asana projects into ClickUp, do the comment threads come with them, or do we arrive with tasks that have lost their history?
• The Slack export we can generate on our plan — does it contain private channels and DMs, or only public ones, and does it include the files or just links to files that will stop resolving?
• Our renewal is in three weeks. What has to be pulled, reconciled, and reconnected before we cancel, and what becomes unreachable the moment the account goes read-only?

Three kinds of pages currently answer those searches, and none of them can answer them properly. Vendor help centres document the inbound direction only: they will tell you in detail how to import into their product and nothing about what breaks when you leave it. Migration agencies stop at "this is complicated, let us handle it", because the complication is the product. Competitor content marketing walks you through a comparison that always terminates at the same conclusion, which is their own tool.

So this site takes the other direction. Each guide covers a specific move at field level — this field maps, this one arrives as plain text, this one has no destination and has to be rebuilt — in both directions, with a list of what is lost and a checklist of what to capture before the account closes.

This site does not rank products and does not recommend one tool over another. There is no "best of" list here and there never will be, because the moment a page has a preferred destination it stops being able to tell you plainly what that destination will fail to import. Documenting procedure and loss is the entire remit.

Nor is it an affiliate storefront or a lead funnel for migration services. Nothing here is paid placement, and no page ends by pointing you at a tool.

It is not legal advice. The contract pages explain how to find exit and renewal terms in a SaaS agreement so you know what to ask about — they do not tell you what your agreement means.

Where accounting software appears, it is strictly about the mechanics of moving files and records between systems: what an export contains, what format preserves the structure, what has to be rebuilt on the other side. Nothing here is tax advice, and no page will tell you how a transaction should be treated.

The failure list

I am Marcus Trewin. I have spent years doing the part of software changeovers that nobody puts in a case study: extracting the data, discovering what the importer quietly dropped, rebuilding it by hand, reconnecting the accounting sync and the automations, and working out what order the cancellation has to happen in so that nothing is stranded behind a closed account.

Most of that work has been for companies small enough that there was no IT department to hand it to — a dozen or two dozen seats, one person handling the switch alongside their actual job. That is the scale this site is written for, and the reason the guides are step-ordered rather than strategic.

I hold no vendor certifications, no partner status with any of the products covered here, and no industry accreditation, and I am not going to imply otherwise. What I have is the failure list: the things that went missing the first time and now go on a pre-cancel checklist.

Checked against the vendor's own documentation

Every page is checked against the vendor's own published documentation before it goes up, and each carries a line reading "Verified against <vendor> documentation on <date>" together with a link to the specific document it was checked against. The date is not decoration. It is the shelf life of the page: vendors change import behaviour, export contents, and plan limits without announcing it, and a claim about what a CSV contains is only ever true as of a date.

Where vendor documentation is vague — which it often is about what an export omits — the page says so rather than guessing, and describes how to test it on your own account before you rely on it. Where behaviour differs by plan tier, the tier is named, because the export you get on a paid plan is frequently not the export described on the marketing page.

When a vendor changes something and a page goes stale, the fix is a re-check against current documentation and a new verification date, not a quiet edit.

Page out of date?

Vendors change export contents and import behaviour without so much as a changelog entry, so whoever ran the move last week knows something this site does not yet. If a field mapped differently for you, or an export turned up missing something described here as included, log it with me — with the plan tier you were on, ideally, because that is usually where the difference hides. What gets changed goes on the page, next to a new verification date.