IMMICASESwitching software is harder than starting. Here is the honest version
You have years of data in a tool your team knows, live deadlines that cannot slip, and a contract with a renewal date. Moving is a project, not a purchase — so this page covers what to export before you give notice, what not to migrate, and the cutover sequence that keeps a caseload safe while it happens.
Is it the software, or is it the process?
Roughly half the firms that tell us their software is the problem have a software problem. The other half have a process problem that a migration will carry across intact, at the cost of two disrupted months. It is worth knowing which you are before you start, and we would rather you found out from this page than from us six months in.
Switching fixes these
- The tool has no concept of IRCC milestones, so your stages are free-text fields your team fills in differently
- Deadlines live in a calendar that is not connected to the case, so missing one is always possible
- Clients have no way to send you documents except email, and intake is still a mailbox
- You cannot produce a complete, time-ordered record of one engagement without assembling it by hand
- Your data sits outside Canada, or you cannot get a straight answer about where it sits
- Per-seat pricing means adding an assistant costs more than the work they would save
Switching will not fix these
- Nobody updates case status — new software will also not be updated unless somebody owns it
- Your checklists are wrong, because they were never written down properly in the first place
- The real bottleneck is that one person is doing intake, drafting and billing alone
- Two consultants disagree about how a file should be run, and the tool is where that argument surfaces
- The last rollout was abandoned halfway, which is a sign the next one needs a different plan, not a different vendor
If your list sits mostly on this side, fix the process in the tool you already have. It is cheaper, and it is the work the migration would have required anyway.
Four things to settle before you sign anything
Including with us. A firm that checks these is a firm that will not be stuck with us either, and that is the right way round.
Get the export before you give notice
Ask your current vendor, in writing, exactly what you can export and in what format: cases, contacts, notes, documents, invoices, audit history. Do it before you tell them you are leaving. A vendor who will only produce a PDF, or who charges for an export, is telling you something about the next vendor you should be checking for too.
Read the renewal and notice clauses
Annual contracts with automatic renewal and a thirty- or sixty-day notice window are common. Finding this out in month eleven is how firms end up paying for a year of software they stopped using. Note the date, set your own reminder, and do not rely on the vendor to raise it.
Check who owns the documents
Storage of your client documents and ownership of them are different questions. Confirm you can retrieve every file, not just a list of their names, and confirm what happens to them after your account closes — and how long you have to act.
Count the real cost of leaving
Overlap months where you pay both vendors, any export or migration fee, and the hours your team spends. Budget two months of overlap. A switch that looks expensive honestly is cheaper than one that looks cheap and then stalls.
Migrate the live caseload, archive the rest
Firms that try to move everything spend months on it and often abandon the switch partway, which leaves the practice split across two systems — the worst available outcome. Firms that move open files and archive the history are usually done in two months.
Move these
- Every open file: client, stream, current stage, next date, outstanding documents
- Documents attached to open files — the ones a submission still depends on
- Contacts and active leads, because the pipeline does not pause for a migration
- Unpaid invoices and outstanding retainer balances, which have to reconcile to the dollar
- Any deadline falling in the next ninety days, entered twice and checked by a second person
Archive these instead
- Closed files, which need to stay intact and retrievable but do not need to be re-keyed
- Years of internal notes on completed matters, which nobody will read in the new system
- Historical reporting, which will not translate between two differently structured tools
- Templates you do not currently use — a migration is a good moment to stop carrying them
- The old tool's workarounds, which exist because of the old tool and should not be rebuilt
Archiving is not deleting
Your record-keeping obligations for completed engagements do not move with your subscription. Canadian immigration practice is commonly understood to require retention for six years; confirm the current requirement against CICC's own guidance rather than ours. Whatever the period, a full export you have opened and checked, stored somewhere you control, is what satisfies it — not an assumption that the old vendor still has your files.
A cutover that does not risk a live deadline
The principle throughout is that the old system stays authoritative until the new one has been proved, and that no deadline inside ninety days is ever held in only one place during the move.
Weeks 1–2 · Parallel, read-only
The new system holds a handful of files; the old one remains the record of truth. Nothing depends on the new tool yet. You are confirming that the data you exported actually lands usefully, and finding out what the export quietly dropped.
Weeks 3–4 · New files start new
Every file opened from this date is created in the new system only. This is the cheapest possible test, because a new file has no history to reconcile, and it stops the problem growing while you work.
Weeks 5–6 · Open caseload moves, in stream batches
Move one stream at a time rather than one consultant at a time, so checklists and milestones are proved per workflow. Deadlines inside ninety days get entered and then verified by someone other than whoever entered them.
Week 7 · Old system goes read-only
Downgrade it, do not cancel it. Nobody writes to it any more, but it remains available while you confirm nothing is missing. This is the step most firms skip and most regret skipping.
Week 8+ · Export, archive, then cancel
Take a full export, store it where your retention policy says it belongs, verify you can open it, and only then cancel. Your obligation to produce a historical file does not end when your subscription does.
What we do and do not do on a migration
There is no universal one-click importer for immigration case management, ours included, because no two vendors structure a case the same way. Anyone promising you one is describing a mapping exercise and calling it a button. So here is the division of labour, plainly.
Included in the Firm plan
Custom onboarding and data migration are part of the plan. We take your export, agree the field mapping with you, load it, and you verify a real sample against the old system before anything goes live.
At any size, through the digitization partnership
Migration is the second phase of our digitization partnership, which is a separate engagement rather than a plan feature, and is open to solo practitioners as much as to firms. It starts with a free readiness review, and the written summary is yours whether or not you go ahead.
On your own, on Solo or Team
Plenty of firms this size would rather just do it, and for a caseload under a couple of hundred files that is often faster than negotiating a field mapping. Follow the parallel-run sequence above, entering open files as you go; it has the side effect of teaching you the tool while you use it. We will sit with you on the first batch either way, and the 14-day trial means the parallel run costs nothing while you are still deciding.
Getting back out, whenever you want
Any client's full record exports as a portable JSON bundle, cases, clients, invoices and the audit log export as CSV, and a scheduled weekly or monthly full export can be written to your own connected OneDrive, Google Drive or Dropbox. That is deliberate: the same export you would want on the way in is the one you would want on the way out. How export and erasure work.
Coming from something specific?
What you have to move depends heavily on what you are moving from. A purpose-built immigration tool exports structured cases that mostly map across. A general legal platform exports matters with free-text stages that have to be interpreted. A generic CRM exports contacts and little else that is useful.
Immicase starts at $49/month for one practitioner and $99/month for up to 5 users, so for most firms the overlap months are the real cost of switching rather than the subscription itself.
Side-by-side comparisons
- From Officio
- From Clio
- From PracticePanther
- From Salesforce, HubSpot or Zoho
- From Trello or a kanban board
- From Airtable, Notion or Sheets
No software at all yet? That is a different and easier project — start here instead.
Bring us your export and we will tell you what is realistic
Send the export your current vendor produces and we will map it, say what will not come across cleanly, and give you a dated cutover plan — before you commit to anything.
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