Article

We switched tools. Do the old records count?

By TrustPast

Updated October 27, 2026

Plenty of companies that have run for fifteen years have changed software at least once. The books moved from a desktop program to an online one. Dispatch moved from a whiteboard and carbon tickets to a field app, then to a different field app. Each time, someone moved the customers and the open jobs, and the rest stayed where it was. So the owner asks a fair question: do the years in the old system still count, and how do we get them out before the login stops working? This page settles both, in micro1’s words where it has them and in ours, labelled, where it doesn’t.

Our cornerstone page on what data buyers want from a trade business sets out what is wanted in general. Here we stay with one situation: the switch, and what it left behind.

The short answer

Yes, as we read micro1’s pages, years of records count across a switch. The condition is plain: the old records have to survive, and someone has to be able to open them.

micro1 doesn’t say records must sit in the system you use today. As we read it, its wording leans the other way. On its data partnerships page: “We evaluate the historical depth, breadth, quality, and relevance of the available data. Companies with several years of records across multiple business systems are generally a stronger fit.”

Its October announcement describes the money as “a new revenue stream from the operational intelligence they have built over years.” Years, not the years since your last migration.

Two limits keep that answer honest. micro1 never says, on the pages we fetched, that it will take any particular old file format. And it says what it does with delivered records: “We review the data for completeness.” So, as our own reading, an old system you can’t open adds nothing. An old system you exported in time adds every year it holds.

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What micro1 says, word for word

We fetched four of micro1’s public pages on 27 October 2026. These are the lines that bear on records spread across old and new systems.

What it looks for. “We are looking for data that reflects how work is actually performed within an organization.” Its eligibility answer names “internal communications, SOPs, project histories, CRM records, support tickets, and other business documentation.”

How much it needs. “There’s no fixed minimum number of files, documents, or terabytes.” Then the line about depth and breadth quoted above.

How it asks about years. Its payout page asks “How many years of data do you have?” The helper text under it reads: “Typically the number of years you’ve been in business”. As our own reading, that is the number a switch tempts owners to shrink. If you have been in business since 2009 and switched in 2018, the honest answer still starts in 2009, if the old records exist.

Whether you clean them first. “No, micro1 has processes for de-identifying and transforming sensitive information.”

What sets the money. “Factors considered include dataset size and volume, workflow complexity, data quality, domain expertise represented, and the uniqueness of the operational knowledge contained within the dataset.” Its payout page adds: “Final payout is determined based on data sources, volume, quality, access terms, and due diligence.” Its referral page puts company compensation at “$100K-$2M+ for approved data packages” (indicative, not an offer).

Why the context matters. The announcement says “Real business operations involve incomplete information, competing priorities and exceptions that require judgment.” Training for that “requires environments that preserve the context behind how businesses work.” As our own reading, the context behind a job often sits in the old system: the notes, the revisions and the callbacks the migration didn’t carry.

What a switch leaves behind

Every switch leaves something. It is worth knowing which kind you have, because each one needs different handling. This list is ours, from the switches owners describe to us.

An archive export. Somebody ran a full export on the way out: a folder of CSV files, a backup file from the desktop program, a zip of PDFs. It sits on a shared drive or an old laptop. This is the best case. Find it, copy it twice, and check that it opens.

A read-only login that lapses. Many online tools keep a cancelled account readable for a while. That window has an end date. QuickBooks’ help page says that when you cancel QuickBooks Online, “you have read-only access to your QuickBooks Online data for one year.” For a trial it is shorter: “If you cancel during a free trial or if your trial expires, your data is available for 90 days.” If your switch was eleven months ago, this section is the urgent one.

A CSV the migration made. The new vendor’s import tool often asked for a spreadsheet of customers and open jobs. That file still exists in someone’s downloads folder. It is useful for one thing: it shows exactly what moved. Everything not in it stayed behind.

Paper files. Carbon-copy tickets, signed estimates, inspection sheets in binders. These are the years before the first software. They are slow to move, and micro1’s pages say nothing about paper or scans. Our page on whether messy records still count covers paper in full. The short version, as our advice: count the boxes and their years, and ask before you scan anything.

Nothing at all. Sometimes the account was closed, not cancelled, and no export was made. We say this plainly: those years are probably gone. Don’t count them.

Where the history breaks

The common break is not the switch itself. It is the scope of the migration.

Take a commercial roofing contractor with 40 people. It ran one job-management system from 2010 to 2019, then moved to a newer one. The migration carried the customer list, the open jobs and the active service agreements. It didn’t carry closed jobs. So the new system’s history starts in 2019, and a manager looking at it would say the company has seven years of records. It has sixteen.

What sits in the gap is the part a buyer’s description points at. Nine years of closed jobs, each with its estimate, its revisions, the change order when the deck was rotten under the old membrane, and the warranty callback two winters later. That chain is how an estimate became a job and how a change order was settled. It is also a repair being diagnosed: the leak that came back, the second visit, the flashing detail that turned out to be the cause.

Three other breaks are worth checking, as our own advice:

Notes dropped, totals kept. Some migrations move the job and its invoice but not the free-text notes or the attachments. The record survives as a number. The reasoning doesn’t.
Estimates not linked to jobs. Quotes come across as one list and jobs as another, with nothing tying them. The estimate that became the job is still there, but the link is gone. Note it; don’t try to rebuild it by hand.
Two systems for one year. Most switches overlap. The same jobs sit in both. Our page on how many years of records count explains how to count the overlap once, not twice.

None of this makes the old records worthless. It makes them a second source. As our own reading, that is the breadth micro1’s page names: records across multiple business systems.

Keep the old system before access ends

This is the practical part. The steps are our own advice. Where a vendor’s own help page says something, we quote it and credit it.

1. Find every old system and write down its status. Accounting, dispatch, CRM, estimating, the shared drive, the old mail server. For each: years covered, whether you can still log in, and when that access ends. Cancelled is not the same as closed, and the difference matters.

Jobber’s help page draws the line clearly. When you cancel, “once the account expires you lose access to the account and you are no longer billed. However, the account still exists which means in the future you could reactivate the same account.” When you close, “your account is removed entirely,” and “Any information that you had in your account will no longer be retrievable.” Our advice: if a tool you no longer use is still open, don’t close it until the export is checked.

2. Know the date the window closes. Jobber says that after you cancel, “you’ll keep full access to your account until the end of your current billing period.” After that, “you’ll lose access to your account data,” “including clients, jobs, invoices, and any other information stored in Jobber.” QuickBooks says that after cancelling QuickBooks Online “you can export data to Excel or to a desktop version of QuickBooks up to a year after you cancel.” It also says that if a card is declined, “you have 14 days to update your billing information,” after which “your account is suspended and you will have to re-subscribe to access your data.” Put the date in a calendar. A lapsed card is a dull way to lose a decade.

3. Export everything the tool lets you export, as it is. Jobber’s closing page says reports in CSV “can be exported from jobber.com which you can retain for your records,” that “Choosing All columns will export all possible columns in the report,” and that “Within 15 minutes you will be sent an email with the exported report attached as a .CSV file.” It adds that quotes, jobs and invoices in PDF “can be downloaded individually.” Our guides walk through the steps for Jobber, QuickBooks Online and Desktop and ServiceTitan. If the old notes and quotes lived in mail, see our guides to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace.

4. Choose the widest date range. Old exports are often limited to “this year” by default. Set the range to cover the whole life of the account.

5. Check that the export opens. Open a few files from different years. Find one closed job and follow it from estimate to invoice. If you can’t, note what is missing while the old login still works.

6. Keep two copies, in their original form. One on a company drive, one somewhere separate. Don’t rename columns, merge files or delete what looks like a duplicate. Four versions of one estimate show how the price was reached.

7. Write it down. One page: each system, its years, how the export was made, the overlap year, and what the migration left out. micro1’s referral page says the company “completes data manifest” when it sets up its profile. That page is what goes in it.

Don’t merge the two systems by hand

Owners want to hand over one clean history. The instinct is understandable and, as our own advice, wrong.

A merge done in a hurry drops the fields that don’t match. It breaks the link between an estimate and the job it became. It loses notes that had nowhere to go in the new layout. And it replaces what happened with someone’s guess about what probably happened.

micro1 says delivered data is reviewed “for completeness,” and that after sharing it is “processed according to the agreed use case and handling requirements.” As our own reading, the shaping of the data is part of the agreement, not a chore for the week before you apply. Two honest exports, each described, with the overlap named, are worth more than one tidy file with holes.

If micro1 sees a fit, its referral page says qualified companies are invited “to connect with a Data Partnership Manager to discuss their data, licensing terms, and next steps.” That is where to ask how two systems should be sent.

From paper and spreadsheets to software

Some switches were not from one tool to another. They were from a filing cabinet and a spreadsheet to the first real system.

The spreadsheet years still describe work. A quote log with a row per job, the price, the date it was won or lost and a note on why. A job list with crew, hours and materials. As our own reading, a spreadsheet that shows how jobs were priced and won is a project history in a simpler format. A contact sheet with a column of notes on each customer is an early CRM record. Both are record types micro1 names in its eligibility answer: “project histories, CRM records”.

The test is the same as for any record. Could a stranger follow one job from the first call to the last visit? If the spreadsheet plus the paper ticket gets you there, those years are history. If the spreadsheet only holds totals, it shows that something was billed, not how the work was done.

What is wanted, and what is not

Every old export holds customer names, addresses and payments. That is the first worry, and it has a short answer.

The records are de-identified before use. micro1’s announcement says it “uses de-identified company data.” Its privacy list says “Personal and identifying information is removed or transformed before your data is shared with third parties”. Its protection answer says “Personally identifiable information (PII) is removed when relevant”. After sharing, “certain datasets may undergo synthetic rewrites that preserve workflow structure while reducing direct ties to original records.” And before prepared data is used, companies are given “the opportunity to review representative samples.”

So customer names and payments are never what is wanted. What is wanted is how the work was done. How an estimate became a job. How a change order was settled when the job turned out different from the quote. How a repair was diagnosed when the first fix didn’t hold. An old system holds the same kind of steps as the new one, just from earlier years. Our page on how de-identification works shows what comes out and what stays.

What this means for a service company that switched systems

Here is one company, as our own hypothetical: an HVAC and plumbing service firm with 50 people, in business since 2008.

What it has. Paper tickets from 2008 to 2011. A desktop accounting file from 2008 to 2016, then an online accounting account. A first dispatch tool from 2012 to 2019, then a second one. Estimates in the dispatch tools, finished in email. A customer list exported as CSV for the 2019 migration.

Where the history breaks. The 2019 migration moved customers and open jobs. Closed tickets from 2012 to 2018 stayed in the first dispatch tool, which was cancelled, not closed. The desktop accounting file sits on an old office computer.

What it does. Checks whether the first dispatch account can still be reactivated, and exports its job, quote and invoice reports with all columns and the full date range. Copies the desktop accounting file, confirms it opens and keeps it on its own side, out of what it describes for sharing. Counts the paper boxes by year. Notes 2019 as the overlap year. Writes the rest on one page.

What it says when asked about years. Eighteen, with a note that 2008 to 2011 are on paper. Our page on what decides the price goes through micro1’s factors one at a time; years of history sits under depth.

For a sense of scale first, our estimate gives a range in a few questions. It is our range, not an offer, and it tells you which buyer fits your headcount. micro1’s referral page lists “30+ employees” among its company requirements.

What is never included

micro1 doesn’t publish one fixed exclusion list. It says it protects “sensitive information through data anonymization and secure handling,” and its first step reads: “We identify licensable datasets across your business and tailor an offer based on the nature, scale, and value of your data.”

As our own advice, not micro1’s guidance, keep these out unless micro1 agrees otherwise in writing: attorney-client privileged records, health information, payment-card and financial-account details, Social Security numbers, minors’ data, biometric data, and classified or export-controlled material. Leave out payroll and staff files, anything a client owns under its contract with you, and the customer list itself.

Old systems make this harder. Accounting exports carry bank and card details. Keep the accounting export so the years survive, but expect most of it to stay on your side: our page on what is never included names the accounting folder among the ones to exclude. An old CRM may hold a free-text note with a tenant’s medical reason for an urgent call. The same page shows where those records tend to hide in an export. How it’s safe gives the short version of the protections.

Where we fit

We, TrustPast, explain how this works and give you a range with our estimate. We never hold your records, and we don’t export them for you. If micro1 is the buyer that fits, you apply to micro1 yourself, and micro1 pays us a referral fee. You pay us nothing.

Worth ten minutes to write down when the old logins expire?

TrustPast

Questions and answers

Do records from a system we no longer use still count?

As we read micro1’s pages, yes, if they can still be opened. micro1 says “Companies with several years of records across multiple business systems are generally a stronger fit.” It doesn’t say the records must sit in the software you use today. That reading is ours; micro1 makes the call company by company.

Our migration only moved open jobs and customers. Is the history lost?

Not always. A migration that carried open jobs often left the closed ones behind, in the old account, in a backup or in an export file made at the time. Find those first. If the old account still has read-only access, export what it holds before that access ends.

How long can we still get into an old QuickBooks Online or Jobber account?

QuickBooks’ help page says that after you cancel QuickBooks Online “you have read-only access to your QuickBooks Online data for one year,” and that a cancelled trial’s data “is available for 90 days.” Jobber’s help page says you keep full access “until the end of your current billing period,” then lose access to “clients, jobs, invoices, and any other information stored in Jobber.” Check your own vendor’s page; terms change.

Should we merge the old system into the new one before we apply?

Our advice is no. A hurried merge drops notes and breaks the link between an estimate and its job. Export each system as it is, write down the years each one covers and the overlap, and describe both in micro1’s data manifest.

Do we have to strip customer names from the old exports first?

No. micro1 answers that question on its data partnerships page: “No, micro1 has processes for de-identifying and transforming sensitive information.” It also says “Personal and identifying information is removed or transformed before your data is shared with third parties”.