I'm biased (little equity in a competitor) and things may have changed, but Wealthbox always made migrating data to other CRMs difficult. I know this because I ran teams that had to do it constantly.
For solo/small firms that only need contacts, not a huge deal. But once you reach a certain size and need to migrate everything, it's a real pain due to their data model and architecture.
I'm sure it's a fine product, but if you're already considering a change, sooner is probably better. And whatever you do, DO NOT STORE IMPORTANT DETAILS AND ATTACHMENTS IN WEALTHBOX NOTES. Even with a white glove data migration service, context in these will be very difficult to keep.
I wrote some scripts back in the day to help with unpacking the export json archive they provided at the time. Might be out of date, but might help some folks get started:
Hold up - can you elaborate on what you mean about not storing important details in notes in Wealthbox?? Maybe some example scenarios and why it’s bad?
The notes feature is really handy when used in the app. You can @mention users/contacts, attach all kinds of media files, record audio, and richtext. Plus you can thread them so one note is a child of another, which is a child of another, etc.
Under the hood, all that freeform information is stored as rich markup code (think HTML with extra properties) with inline references to related records. It looks nice when rendered in Wealthbox, but is pretty much unstructured under the hood. If I had an example export on-hand, I could show you what I mean.
The reason this is bad from a migration standpoint is that many CRMs don't have this kind of super-freeform 'notes' concept, and if they do, they're not going to render that markup code the same way, nor will they necessarily be able to be related to other migrated records in the same way.
You'll be able to get the underlying text, but it will be very difficult to maintain references to other records made inline in the note itself (@mentions to users or contacts), formatting, and attached files.
This was my experience from a few years ago. Things may be different now, and smarter people may have found better methods than I was able. But it was a real pain point for firms on Wealthbox switching to our Salesforce-based CRM.
I wrote about my experience with this a few years back:
Wow - this is so helpful! It's so frustrating to me that more people don't recognize these Wealthbox constraints and so therefore it's not talked about. I was under the impression that Wealthbox Notes were essentially just vanilla HTML objects, not markup. But I guess that makes sense.
That helps explain some things for me. We've been on Wealthbox for a little over 3 years now and while it's been a huge improvement over our prior Salesforce Classic environment, as we've grown we have started to run into some of these technical structure limitations. Heck I've even talked to Thomas and Max at Slant about some of the data architecture constraints as a way to validate my own struggles with it, and to try to influence their buildout to avoid the same problems.
I will say though that, at least now, Wealthbox does have an array of "Linked to" contact objects for Notes, so maybe during a migration and with a little scripting it'd be possible to maintain inline references? Definitely seems like a lot of work though and very error prone...
I'm biased (little equity in a competitor) and things may have changed, but Wealthbox always made migrating data to other CRMs difficult. I know this because I ran teams that had to do it constantly.
For solo/small firms that only need contacts, not a huge deal. But once you reach a certain size and need to migrate everything, it's a real pain due to their data model and architecture.
I'm sure it's a fine product, but if you're already considering a change, sooner is probably better. And whatever you do, DO NOT STORE IMPORTANT DETAILS AND ATTACHMENTS IN WEALTHBOX NOTES. Even with a white glove data migration service, context in these will be very difficult to keep.
Good to know... we're all biased in one way or another :)
I wrote some scripts back in the day to help with unpacking the export json archive they provided at the time. Might be out of date, but might help some folks get started:
https://medium.com/@jaycenall/unlock-wealthbox-data-convert-json-export-to-normalized-csvs-ab63ce012d3e
Hold up - can you elaborate on what you mean about not storing important details in notes in Wealthbox?? Maybe some example scenarios and why it’s bad?
The notes feature is really handy when used in the app. You can @mention users/contacts, attach all kinds of media files, record audio, and richtext. Plus you can thread them so one note is a child of another, which is a child of another, etc.
Under the hood, all that freeform information is stored as rich markup code (think HTML with extra properties) with inline references to related records. It looks nice when rendered in Wealthbox, but is pretty much unstructured under the hood. If I had an example export on-hand, I could show you what I mean.
The reason this is bad from a migration standpoint is that many CRMs don't have this kind of super-freeform 'notes' concept, and if they do, they're not going to render that markup code the same way, nor will they necessarily be able to be related to other migrated records in the same way.
You'll be able to get the underlying text, but it will be very difficult to maintain references to other records made inline in the note itself (@mentions to users or contacts), formatting, and attached files.
This was my experience from a few years ago. Things may be different now, and smarter people may have found better methods than I was able. But it was a real pain point for firms on Wealthbox switching to our Salesforce-based CRM.
I wrote about my experience with this a few years back:
https://medium.com/@jaycenall/the-wealthbox-migration-playbook-3b3ad06b8032
Wow - this is so helpful! It's so frustrating to me that more people don't recognize these Wealthbox constraints and so therefore it's not talked about. I was under the impression that Wealthbox Notes were essentially just vanilla HTML objects, not markup. But I guess that makes sense.
That helps explain some things for me. We've been on Wealthbox for a little over 3 years now and while it's been a huge improvement over our prior Salesforce Classic environment, as we've grown we have started to run into some of these technical structure limitations. Heck I've even talked to Thomas and Max at Slant about some of the data architecture constraints as a way to validate my own struggles with it, and to try to influence their buildout to avoid the same problems.
I will say though that, at least now, Wealthbox does have an array of "Linked to" contact objects for Notes, so maybe during a migration and with a little scripting it'd be possible to maintain inline references? Definitely seems like a lot of work though and very error prone...