FSC isn’t Sales Cloud with a nicer logo. Households, person accounts, relationship groups, financial accounts and roles have to be modeled first, or you end up with a very expensive contact list. I do FSC migrations specifically, from Redtail, Wealthbox, legacy Salesforce orgs, spreadsheets and whatever else the practice has been running on.
None of these exist in a Redtail backup or a Wealthbox export. All of them have to be designed and rebuilt before the load, by someone who has made these calls a hundred times.
In FSC a household is an account with members, roles and a primary contact. Your source has a spouse link, a shared last name, or a note that says “wife.” Someone has to decide which clients form a household, and defend that decision to the advisors.
Contacts don’t survive the trip as contacts. Record types, person-account setup, and which fields live where have to be settled before load, because changing them afterwards is a migration of its own.
Account-contact relationships, reciprocal roles and relationship groups turn “related to” into something an advisor can filter on. A flat export loses all of it unless it’s rebuilt deliberately.
Every custodial account needs an owner, a household rollup, and a role for each joint owner and beneficiary. Loaded wrong, your AUM-by-household is fiction and nobody notices until a review meeting.
FSC models these as their own account types with their own relationships. Dump them in as contacts and every rollup that depends on them is wrong from the first day.
Households, then people, then relationships, then financial accounts, then activities and notes, in batches sized to avoid row locks on the household record. Get the order wrong and the Bulk API tells you about it 40,000 times.
All of it runs through the same seven-step method, in the same order, every engagement. See the full methodology, step by step →
The migration ran like a Sales Cloud project: contacts in, households “later.” Later never comes, every rollup is wrong, and the advisors go back to the old CRM because at least it knew who was married to whom.
The implementation partner is excellent at build. The data workstream got a junior consultant and a spreadsheet. Six months after go-live, half the notes are still in Redtail.
Nobody decided whether a trust is a household member or its own account, so every advisor decided differently. Now there are four conventions, no reporting, and a cleanup project nobody budgeted.
FSC is the right call for a lot of wealth management firms and the wrong call for some. If a well-designed Sales Cloud org with a custom household model fits your size and your plans better, I’ll say so on the first call, and I’ll migrate you there instead. I’d rather lose the FSC project than build you the wrong org.
Each acquired practice arrived on Redtail with its own household logic and years of email archives. Every one now lands in the same FSC structure on a predictable timeline, with households, financial accounts and relationship groups rebuilt the same way every time.
A nationally ranked fiduciary firm with offices across the state. Each acquired practice’s data lands fast and clean, privacy preserved between offices, and no duplicate client records created when matching against custodial data feeds.
“Data migration is the scariest part of the project for everyone in the room. It’s my favorite part.”
Elise Pottinger, SMC Migrations
What your export contains, what it doesn’t, what the household model should look like, and a fixed fee once I’ve seen the data.
