Migration & onboarding

A system switch is the most delicate phase in the life of an HR department. A wrongly-imported vacation balance is not just embarrassing — it’s legally exposed. Agenda therefore offers a structured onboarding path in three phases. Each phase is closed and signed off before the next starts.

Empirical: a business with 10–50 employees switches over fully in 1–2 weeks without losing a single business day.

Phase 1 — Master data (day 1–3)

The foundation. Without this, no calculation can be correct.

What gets imported:

Employee list with first/last name, personnel number, email, hire date
Branches / locations with their hierarchy
Roles and permissions (who’s allowed what)
Working-time models (40h/week, 35h/week, part-time, etc.)
Vacation entitlement per employee (default + individual extras)
Standard weekly schedules (Mon–Fri 8h each, etc.)

Format: Excel list or CSV — on request we prepare the template from the structures of your current system. Almost every classical time-tracking or HR product can produce the required lists through a master-data or balances export.

What works already: as soon as master data is in Agenda, every employee can sign in and use the app — even before balances are imported.

Phase 2 — Balances at cut-off (day 4–7)

The trickiest part. You choose a cut-off date — typically month-end or January 1 — and transfer exactly the balances that should stand at the end of that day.

What’s imported:

Balance	Expected format	Example
Vacation remaining at cut-off	Days as decimal	12.5
Carryover from previous year	Days as decimal	0 or 3.5
Carryover expiry	DD.MM.	31.03.
Flex time balance	Hours:minutes	04:35
Pending spill / payout	Hours:minutes	02:15
Sick days YTD	Days	4
Vocational school days YTD (apprentices)	Days	6

You hand over an Excel; we import in a controlled batch. Every value is presented to you before import, you sign off, then it’s booked.

Why so careful: because one hour too many or too few in the flex account can spark a two-month-later argument with the employee. Agenda documents each of these initial balances as an “opening entry” — clearly identifiable even years later.

Phase 3 — Go-live (day 8–14)

From here on, clocking is done daily. We’re with you closely for the first two weeks:

Days 1–3: only individual pilot employees clock in Agenda; the rest stay in the old system
Days 4–7: the entire workforce clocks in Agenda; the old system runs read-only (you can still look in, but no longer clock)
Days 8–14: the old system is shut down, Agenda is the only source of truth
Month end: first DATEV export out of Agenda, compared with the last export from the old system (same movements, clean handover)

What about historical data?

Three options — we usually recommend B:

A) Full history. We import the last 3 years of bookings incl. requests and approvals. Advantage: complete search in Agenda. Downside: 3–5 extra days of work, risk of inconsistencies inherited from the old system.

B) Balances only, old system as archive. We import the cut-off state (phase 2) and let the old system run as a read-only archive. This is what we recommend. Advantage: fast switch, clear before/after separation. Downside: for older entries you briefly look into the old system.

C) Bridge mode. Both systems keep running in parallel, with Agenda having a read-link to the old one. Only useful for large operations with very complex edge cases.

Migration assistant (in preparation)

So you don’t have to count by hand, we’re building a web-based migration assistant — target release: 2026. How it works:

Upload — drop in your master-data and balances export (Excel, CSV, or a direct API key).
Analysis — the assistant detects the structure, maps each column to the Agenda data model and shows you, per employee, the values it would import: vacation remaining, flex balance, pending payouts.
Confirmation — before anything is imported you see a review table. Each row can be approved, corrected, or skipped.
Start — only on your confirmation does the booking happen. Until then nothing in Agenda has changed.
Rollback — for the first 72 hours after import you can revert in one click. After that the opening entries remain as an audit trail.

You get the comfort of automatic import with the safety of a manual review — no Excel column-shuffling, no macros.

Concrete migration paths

Classical time-tracking terminals

Punch terminals with central reporting software typically expose a master-data and balances export (CSV or DATEV-compatible). The flex time, spill and vacation remaining balances map 1:1 to the Agenda data model — usually no conversion required. Typical migration time: 3–5 working days.

Workforce-management software with DATEV interface

These systems export via their DATEV interfaces, which we can ingest directly. The last 12 months of movements are enough to reconstruct balances. Typical migration time: 5–7 working days.

Cloud HR platforms with API

API-based export. The employee-balance endpoints deliver everything we need. Typical migration time: 2–4 working days.

Excel lists / punch cards

The manual route works too. We send you a prepared Excel template, you fill it, we verify and import. Typical migration time: 3–5 working days (depending on headcount).

What we don’t take along

Some data deliberately doesn’t migrate:

Old requests unrelated to open balances — readable in the old system, but they’d just clog Agenda.
Payroll runs — those live with the tax consultant anyway. Agenda continues to deliver DATEV exports into the same payroll workflow.
Personal notes from the old system — often copyright-sensitive and rarely transfer losslessly.

Success indicators

We confirm the successful switch via five concrete checkpoints:

✅ Every employee can sign in and book hours
✅ The vacation balance in the new system matches the old one to the day at cut-off
✅ Flex balances match to the minute
✅ The first DATEV export from Agenda after the switch matches the old system’s last payroll run
✅ At least three randomly-picked employees verbally confirm: “Looks right.”

Only when all five are ticked do we shut down the old system.

What you save

No double maintenance during the switch (one week max).
No lost vacation days, no swallowed flex time.
No argument with the works council — the entire transition is documented.
No gap in payroll — the transition month has a clean balance.

Next steps

Overview — what you have on a daily basis after migration
Get in touch for a non-binding migration check.