Switching from Buildertrend, JobTread, Knowify — or from a stack of spreadsheets.
What moves, what doesn’t, and how long it takes — before you commit to anything
Nobody switches project software mid-job unless it is easy, and most “migration” promises quietly mean “we will help you retype it”. So here is the honest version, including the part where we tell you not to migrate.
Don’t migrate. Start the next job.
The fastest switch isn’t a switch. Finish your live jobs where they are, and run the next one you win in MAGE ID. You will know inside one job cycle, you will not have re-keyed anything, and if it isn’t for you, you have lost nothing. Most people who try to move everything at once give up in week two — in any tool, not just this one.
What comes across in about fifteen minutes
- Your pipeline. Copy a column of client names out of a spreadsheet, Notes, or an email and paste it. They land as leads for review — you delete the junk before anything is created, so a messy paste never silently makes junk records.
- Your contacts and subs. Same paste, and projects, contacts and subcontractors can also come in as a structured import.
- Your price book. Paste the rates you already know, or type them, so your day-one estimate isn’t a beginner’s. Important, and the part we won’t bend on: a rate you tell us is stored as a claim, not a measurement. It is tagged as seeded, it does not count toward your closed-job count — a seeded book still honestly reads “0 closed jobs” — and the first real job you finish outweighs it immediately. We will not let the app pretend you have closed jobs here that you haven’t.
- An existing schedule. .xlsx and MS Project XML (MSPDI) import directly. The Excel path shows you the detected column mapping and a live preview before it commits; the MS Project path is fully deterministic. Your current tasks are baselined first, so the import is undoable. Pro tier.
What doesn’t come across
Historical job-cost detail from another platform. Nobody’s export is shaped like anyone else’s import, and a half-imported cost history is worse than none — it quietly poisons the numbers your estimator learns from, which is the one thing in this product that has to stay clean. Keep the old PDFs. Start the learning here from zero, on purpose.
Open pay applications mid-draw. Finish the draw schedule where it started. Carrying prior-billing totals across two systems by hand is how a G702 ends up disagreeing with itself.
We would rather tell you both of those now than after you have paid.
Getting your data out of where you are
Useful regardless of what you buy next, and the person reading this has usually already decided to leave:
- Buildertrend — exports are per-module rather than one archive; pull Financials, Schedule, Daily Logs and Documents separately, and pull them before your renewal date rather than after.
- JobTread — list views export to CSV; do the customer, job and cost-item lists, and download document attachments separately since they don’t come with the CSV.
- Knowify — reports export to CSV/Excel; the job-costing and time reports are the ones worth keeping.
- Spreadsheets — you are already done; paste the client column and the rate column and you are most of the way in.
- Whichever you are on, take the export while the subscription is still live. Every vendor’s access ends with the billing period, ours included.
Those are descriptions of other vendors’ published export features, not instructions we can guarantee — their products change. Check with them. Buildertrend, JobTread and Knowify are trademarks of their respective owners and none is affiliated with MAGE ID.
And getting out of here
Settings → Data Export. One file with every project (and the estimate and revision history on it), invoice, change order, daily report, punch item, photo, RFI, submittal, warranty, contact and subcontractor you have. JSON or CSV, human-readable, no ticket and nobody to ask.
Do it on your first day, before you trust us with anything. That is what it is for, and it is the reason the export was built before the paywall was. If you can prove you can leave, the rest of the decision gets a lot smaller.
Start the next job here — free →
The free plan is live on the web right now, no card. Paid plans aren’t self-serve yet — the iPhone app is in TestFlight rather than the App Store and our payment processor is still in sandbox, so you email us and we switch Pro or Business on, usually the same day. The prices are published either way.
If you are leaving a tool that did accounts payable
Say so before you move, because this is the one gap that sends people back. There is no payables ledger here: no vendor aging, no pay-when-paid, no check run, no batch payment file, and no way to originate a bill a sub did not submit. MAGE ID never moves money.
What does come across is the job-cost half. A sub’s paper bill or a supply-house invoice is photographed, read, checked with you and posted as a cost against the right job and cost code (Business tier). Subs on a portal submit invoices to you and you approve or reject with notes. QuickBooks Online bills land in a review queue you approve line by line. When you pay it, you record the check number or ACH trace, so paid-versus-owed ties out to your bank and your 1099s are real — and a “paid” with no reference is flagged as unreconciled rather than quietly closing the balance.
If you need real AP, keep QuickBooks and connect it. The same answer, in full, on the pricing page.