Switching Strata Management Software: A Migration Checklist
What actually has to move, in what order, so nothing falls through the cracks.
7 min read
Why switching feels riskier than it is
The fear behind most software switches isn’t the new tool — it’s the migration. Councils worry about losing years of email threads, managers worry about re-keying every lease by hand, and everyone worries about the week where nothing works right. None of that is unique to Pastrata, and none of it has to happen if the migration is planned as a checklist instead of a leap. The rest of this guide is that checklist: what to inventory before you start, what to bring over first, and what "done" looks like.
Step 1: Inventory what you actually have
Before touching any new platform, write down what exists today: how many buildings, how many units and leases per building, where documents live (a shared drive, a filing cabinet, the old platform’s export), and where correspondence lives (a shared mailbox, individual managers’ inboxes, or both). This inventory is the yardstick you’ll use to know the migration is complete — not a guess at "we probably got most of it."
Step 2: Get a building live before you migrate anything
A new building can be set up and live on Pastrata in under 30 minutes through the guided onboarding wizard — building profile, units, and initial council roles, with no lease or document import required yet. Getting the shell of the building live first means your team can start learning the day-to-day tools (inbox, notices, calendar) on real work while the deeper data migration happens in parallel, instead of blocking everything on a single big-bang cutover.
Step 3: Bring leases over in bulk, not one at a time
For portfolios with tenants, re-keying leases by hand is the single biggest source of migration dread — and the biggest reason migrations stall. Bulk lease import handles this at portfolio scale: leases come in from a CSV (or a folder of lease PDFs), each row is validated and shown to a manager for approval before anything is created, and a full batch typically completes in under a day per 50 leases. Because rows are reviewed before import, a bad date or a mismatched unit gets caught before it becomes a resident-facing problem, not after.
Step 4: Decide what happens to your email history
Every building that has been running for more than a season has a shared mailbox full of institutional memory — old vendor quotes, past board decisions, resident complaints nobody wants to re-litigate. A managed onboarding brings that history in with a manager-reviewed preview: connect the existing shared mailbox, see counts and a sample of what will be imported by date range and sender, and approve before a single message is written into the building’s record. Nothing is imported silently or irreversibly — you see it before it lands.
Step 5: Bring documents in with the paper trail intact
Bylaws, meeting minutes, insurance certificates, and financial statements should move with the same care as leases: bulk document upload from the files you already have, categorized so the library is browsable on day one rather than a dumping ground you sort out later. If your portfolio’s document set is large, plan document migration as its own checklist item — don’t assume it rides along automatically with the lease import.
Step 6: Cut over communication channels deliberately
Pick a cutover date for where new resident and vendor correspondence lands, and communicate it once, clearly, rather than running two channels indefinitely. After cutover, new mail continues flowing in — a migration is a starting point for ongoing sync, not a one-time dump you have to repeat every few months when the old inbox fills back up.
Step 7: Confirm nothing was left behind
Go back to the inventory from Step 1 and check it off: every building live, every lease imported (or explicitly deferred with a plan), every document category populated, and email history either imported or consciously left in its original mailbox as a read-only archive. A migration isn’t "done" because the old tool was cancelled — it’s done when the new one has everything the old one had, and the team knows where to find it.
See it on your portfolio
A 30-minute walkthrough sized to your building count — and you leave with real portfolio pricing.