Export everything, then decide what to carry
Take three exports rather than one: people, companies and opportunities, each as its own CSV, plus a fourth pull of open activities if your desk works from tasks. Deal history matters more here than contact volume, so keep the stage, owner, value and expected close columns intact and resist the temptation to tidy names during the export itself. Anything quietly dropped at this stage becomes an argument three months later about whether the old system ever held it.
Map Arabic and English name fields before the import runs
Most Egyptian databases carry the same person twice: once transliterated for the paperwork and once in Arabic for the chat thread. Decide which spelling is the display name and which is the alternate, map both to their own fields, and set duplicate detection on the mobile number rather than the name. In a book where three spellings of one client are entirely ordinary, the mobile number is the only key that reliably identifies a human being.
Repoint the WhatsApp number, then run both systems for a week
Moving the business number is the one step with a visible interruption, so schedule it for a Thursday afternoon and confirm the Arabic and English template libraries are loaded before you begin. Then leave the old system readable but not writable for a week. Reps log new activity in exactly one place while managers still have somewhere to look when a client refers back to a conversation from before the change. A week is usually enough for those lookups to stop.
Check the first invoice cycle line by line
The first month-end after any migration is where mapping mistakes surface. Pull the invoice records raised from deals, confirm that registration numbers, item descriptions and pound amounts read the way your accountant expects for Egyptian Tax Authority filing, and reconcile instalment schedules against what was actually collected. Correct the field mapping then, while the exposure is one month of documents rather than a full quarter of them.
