The deal is done. Now the work starts
You have bought a smaller reseller's customer base: a few hundred business customers with hosted voice, broadband, some analogue lines and a mobile book. The deal was priced on their monthly billing. Now their data arrives: a billing export with their own product codes, a spreadsheet of contracts, supplier accounts with three different wholesalers, and a shared drive of PDFs.
Your finance team needs these customers in your billing platform before the next bill run. Provisioning need to know which supplier services sit behind each customer. Account managers want to introduce themselves. And the previous owner, who knew everything, is helping for a few weeks and then moving on.
The first bill run from your platform goes out with some customers missing lines they were paying for, some billed for services they no longer have, and a flood of calls asking why the bill looks different.
Behind the scenes, some supplier services still sit in the seller's accounts, and the seller is still paying for them. That becomes a tense conversation about who owes whom.
Why migrating a base is harder than it looks
- The seller's product codes, tariffs and bundles do not match yours.
- Their billing may include services that were ceased with the supplier but never removed from the bill, and the reverse.
- Contract start dates and terms are incomplete, so renewals are unknown.
- Supplier services need transferring to your accounts, supplier by supplier, each with its own process.
- Customers were told little, and they notice any change on their bill.
The value you paid for is in the billing. Every service that is lost, underbilled or cannot be traced to a supplier makes the purchase worth less.
Where value leaks in a migration
| Gap | Effect on the deal |
|---|---|
| Services billed by seller but not by you | Revenue lost from the first month |
| Services billed with no supplier cost behind | Customer may be paying for nothing, dispute likely |
| Supplier cost with no billing | You pay for services nobody is charged for |
| Contract dates unknown | Renewals missed, customers drift |
| Customers not informed | Complaints and early cancellations |
The migration process we build
- The seller's billing export, contract data and supplier reports are loaded into a staging area, not into your live systems.
- Their products are mapped to yours in a table your team agrees, product by product. Anything that does not map is listed.
- Every customer service is matched three ways: seller's billing, supplier records, and contracts. Services that match all three are ready to move. The others go into queues by type of gap.
- Your team works the queues: confirm, correct or exclude, with notes. The previous owner's knowledge is captured in those notes while they are still available.
- Clean customers are loaded into your billing platform and CRM, with contract dates and supplier references. A parallel bill is produced and compared with the seller's last bill for each customer before anything goes out.
- Supplier transfers are tracked per supplier and per service until each is in your name, with the cost moved in step with the billing.
We also generate the customer welcome letters from the same data, so each customer is told who you are and what, if anything, changes for them.
What a well-run migration gives you
Your first bill run for the new customers matches what they paid before, or differs for a reason you chose. Every service is traced to a supplier and a contract, or listed as a known gap being worked. Account managers get a renewal list for their new customers from day one.
And you know what you actually bought, which is useful for any final payment tied to the performance of the base.
The same process is reusable. If you plan to buy more bases, the mapping tables, the queues and the parallel bill check are already built, and the next migration starts from a working method instead of a blank spreadsheet and a nervous finance team.
Is this where you are?
- You have bought, or are about to buy, a customer base.
- The seller's data is in exports and spreadsheets.
- You are not sure every billed service has a supplier behind it.
- Contract dates for acquired customers are unknown.
- Your first bill run for them is coming up soon.