Leaving ConnectWise Manage: moving tickets, agreements and billing to a new PSA

A ConnectWise Manage migration succeeds or fails on billing, not on tickets. Export companies, contacts, configurations and active agreements cleanly, archive closed ticket history rather than forcing it into a new schema, and run your last full invoice cycle from Manage before the new PSA bills anything. Done that way, the move takes roughly six weeks for a small to mid-sized MSP. Here is the plan, record type by record type, then week by week.

Why billing, not ticket history, is the real risk

Owners tend to worry about losing ten years of tickets. That worry is misplaced. Old tickets are consulted rarely, and a searchable archive serves that need perfectly well. A missed invoice run, by contrast, hits cash flow in the same month and makes clients wonder what else you have dropped.

So the order of priority is: whatever produces money (agreements, additions, unbilled time), then whatever produces service (open tickets, contacts, configurations), then whatever produces memory (closed history). Plan in that order and most of the hard decisions make themselves.

What to export from ConnectWise Manage

Manage lets you export most list views to CSV, and its REST API exposes the same records in more detail. For a small estate, CSV exports are usually enough. For larger ones, or where you want attachments and notes intact, a script against the API or a purpose-built migration service will save time.

• Companies and sites. Export with company type and status, then prune. Prospects that never signed and clients that left years ago do not need to travel. Skip this and your new PSA starts life as cluttered as the old one.
• Contacts. Include email, phone, company link and any portal or approver flags. Check for duplicates first, because Manage estates accumulate duplicate contacts the way shared inboxes accumulate unread newsletters.
• Configurations. Bring the ones attached to live agreements or open tickets. If your RMM syncs devices into the new PSA, you may not need to import them at all.
• Agreements and additions. The most important export. Capture agreement type, billing cycle, start and end dates, prepaid hours or block balances, and every addition with quantity and unit price. Skip this and you will rebuild contracts from invoices, which is a guess wearing a spreadsheet's clothes.
• Open tickets. Migrate these properly, with status, priority, board, assignee and the latest notes.
• Time entries. Export all unbilled time without exception, plus billed time for the current financial year if you need it for reporting.

What to archive rather than migrate

Closed tickets are the classic trap. Manage's boards, statuses, service types and subtypes rarely map one-to-one onto another PSA, so imported history arrives with flattened categories and broken links. You pay for the import and get a worse version of what you already had.

A good archive is a full CSV and API export of closed tickets, notes and time, stored somewhere searchable with retention set to match your contracts and data protection obligations. Keep a read-only Manage licence for a short overlap if your contract allows it, but do not let it become the permanent archive: that is just paying for the old system indefinitely. The same logic applies to other platforms, as covered in our piece on when to archive tickets instead of migrating them.

Keeping invoicing uninterrupted through cutover

The rule is simple: one system owns each invoice run. Never let both bill the same period.

Pick a cutover date just after a normal billing run. Manage produces that month's recurring invoices and bills all time logged up to the cutover date. From the next cycle onwards, the new PSA owns recurring billing, and every new time entry goes into it from cutover day.

Before that first run, reconcile. For each client, the new PSA's draft recurring invoice should match the last one Manage sent, line for line, unless a contract changed. Any difference is either an import error or a price change nobody wrote down. Both are worth finding before the client does.

Check your accounting link too. If Manage pushes invoices into Xero or QuickBooks, disconnect that sync at cutover so nothing duplicates, and make sure the new PSA uses the same customer records, item codes and tax settings. Our guide to PSA billing that syncs to Xero and QuickBooks covers what to look for there.

Two systems billing the same month is not belt and braces. It is two invoices.

A week-by-week ConnectWise Manage migration plan

1. Week one: inventory and decide. Check your ConnectWise contract end date and notice period. List every board, agreement type and integration. Decide what migrates and what is archived, and pick the cutover date.
2. Week two: clean in place. Merge duplicate contacts, close dead companies, expire ended agreements and chase technicians to finish their time sheets. Cleaning in Manage is easier than cleaning after import.
3. Week three: test import. Export everything, import into the new PSA's trial or sandbox, and map boards to queues and agreement types to contract templates. Expect the first import to be wrong.
4. Week four: reconcile and train. Compare draft invoices against Manage's last run. Set up SLA rules, the client portal and email routing. Train the service desk on live-looking data.
5. Week five: cutover. Run Manage's final billing cycle. Switch support email and portal links to the new PSA, import open tickets and unbilled time fresh, and freeze Manage to read-only.
6. Week six: first new billing run and archive. Bill from the new PSA, review every invoice by hand once, take the final archive export and confirm it is searchable before cancelling.

If you are moving off ConnectWise Automate at the same time, sequence the RMM separately; our Automate migration guide covers agents and scripts.

Failure modes to watch for

The common ways this goes wrong are predictable: prepaid block balances that do not carry over, so clients lose hours they paid for; additions imported at an old unit price; support email still pointing at Manage, so tickets vanish for a week; and closed history imported at great effort and never opened again. Each is cheap to prevent in week three and expensive to fix in week seven.

Where this fits with Helios

Most of this plan is discipline, not tooling, and it works whichever PSA you choose. Helios combines RMM and PSA in one product, with a helpdesk with SLA clocks, client portals, time tracking and billing into Xero or QuickBooks, so recurring invoices and device counts come from the same place. It is priced by fleet size rather than per technician, with every feature on every plan, and there is a 14-day free trial with no card, which is long enough to run your week-three test import. If you are still weighing options, our ConnectWise alternatives guide compares the field.

Common questions about leaving ConnectWise Manage

Can I export ticket history from ConnectWise Manage myself?

Yes. ConnectWise Manage lets you export list views, including tickets, to CSV, and its REST API returns tickets with notes and time entries in more detail. CSV is fine for a searchable archive. For migrating open tickets with full notes and attachments, an API script or a dedicated migration service is usually more reliable than spreadsheets.

Should I migrate closed tickets to my new PSA?

Usually not. Closed tickets in ConnectWise Manage rely on boards, service types and statuses that rarely map cleanly onto another PSA, so imported history often arrives with broken categories. Archiving closed tickets in a searchable export keeps the information available for lookups without paying to import records that technicians will rarely, if ever, work on again.

How do I avoid double-billing clients during a PSA switch?

Give each billing period to exactly one system. Let ConnectWise Manage run the final full cycle and bill all time up to cutover, then disconnect its accounting sync. The new PSA takes over recurring invoices from the next cycle, after you have reconciled its drafts line by line against the last invoices Manage produced.

Related: Leaving SuperOps: migrating RMM, PSA and client data to another platform

Researched and written with Helio SEO, our AI writer for business blogs.