The Marina Software Buyer's Guide
Data Migration
The part nobody talks about until it goes wrong, and how to make your history arrive intact
Ask an operator what worries them about switching and they'll say training, or downtime. Almost nobody says data migration, which is exactly why it's the phase that causes the most pain. Moving years of customers, contracts, and history from one system to another is unglamorous, invisible until it breaks, and the hardest thing to fix once you're live. This chapter is about getting it right the first time.
The phase nobody plans for
Everyone plans the training. Almost nobody plans the data. And yet the data is where switches quietly go wrong: lost history, balances that don't tie out, customers who now exist three times. The worst part is the timing, because the damage usually surfaces after go-live, when it's hardest and most public to fix.
This phase went first in the timeline in Chapter 17 for a reason, and your data-export rights became a contract clause in Chapter 9 for this exact moment. Now you use them.
Nobody talks about data migration until the day the numbers don't match. Then it's the only thing anyone talks about.
What actually has to move
Everything that makes your operation legible has to come across, and not all of it moves equally easily.
| Data | What it includes | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|
| Customers | Contacts, boats, and the link between them. | Moderate: duplicates are common. |
| Contracts | Seasonal agreements, terms, and renewal dates. | Harder: often semi-structured or on paper. |
| Transactions | Invoices, payments, and current balances. | Moderate, but must reconcile exactly. |
| Slip assignments | Who is in which slip, and for what dates. | Easier if current, harder for history. |
| History | Past seasons, ledgers, and customer records. | Hardest: volume and legacy formats. |
Recent, active, structured records move cleanly. Deep history, custom fields, and half-finished records are where the work lives. So make one decision early: how much history do you actually need live in the new system, and how much can be archived as a read-only copy? You rarely need ten seasons of detail on day one, and deciding deliberately shrinks the whole job.
What goes wrong with the data
The data you're moving is almost always messier than you remember. Expect all of these, because every marina has them:
- Duplicates. The same customer entered three different ways across the years, each with a piece of the history.
- Partial records. Missing emails, boats with no owner attached, contracts with blank fields.
- Legacy fields that don't map. A custom field you've relied on for a decade with no obvious home in the new system.
- Format mismatches. Dates, phone numbers, and code lists that the two systems format differently.
This is precisely why the audit-and-cleanup phase from Chapter 17 is yours to own, not the vendor's. Only you know which "John Smith" is the real one. Clean the data before it moves, because importing a mess just relocates it into a system you're now paying for.
Pull a sample export from your current system early, before you're committed to a date, and just look at it. The state of that file, how clean, how complete, how structured, predicts the difficulty of your entire migration better than anything a vendor will tell you.
What to demand from both vendors
A migration involves two vendors: the one you're leaving and the one you're joining. Each owes you something specific, and you should insist on it in writing.
From the outgoing vendor
- A complete export in a structured, importable format, with customers, contracts, transactions, slip assignments, and history preserved, at no extra fee, the export right you secured in Chapter 9.
- A timeline for producing it that fits your migration window, not theirs.
From the incoming vendor
- Real import support, not "here's a template, good luck." A named person who owns the import.
- A field-mapping plan that shows where each piece of your old data lands, including the legacy fields.
- A test import you can validate before the real one, so errors surface on a copy, not on your live system.
An incoming vendor who treats the import as entirely your problem, or an outgoing one who slow-walks the export, is telling you how the rest of the relationship will go. Import support is not a favor; it's part of what you're buying.
The parallel run
Never migrate by flipping a switch. Run both systems side by side for the parallel-run period from Chapter 17, and only retire the old one once the new one has earned it.
During the parallel run, the work is validation:
- Enter real transactions in both systems and compare the results.
- Reconcile the migrated data against the old system: balances, customer counts, open contracts, key accounts.
- Commit to the new system as the single source of truth only when the two agree and your staff can run a normal day without a cheat sheet.
For multi-site operators, resist the urge to migrate the whole portfolio at once. Prove the process on one representative property first, turn what you learn into a repeatable playbook, and roll the rest site by site. A mistake caught at one marina is a lesson; the same mistake made across twelve at once is a crisis.
Clean the data before it moves, demand a real export and real import support in writing, and prove the migration with a parallel run before you trust it. The goal is simple: your history arrives intact, and the numbers on the new system match the numbers on the old.
Staff training and adoption
Clean data in a new system still fails if the team won't use it. The next phase is people: training that sticks, and getting staff to adopt the new way instead of quietly keeping the old one.
Read Chapter 19 →References and further reading
- Sharper MMS, Map the Switch Migration Assessment
- Association of Marina Industries (AMI), industry research and benchmark data. marinaassociation.org
- Storable Marine, AMI, and Marina Dock Age, Navigating the Numbers: 2026 Marina Operator Insights & Technology Automation