eventmen

Getting the data across

An adapter, not a leap of faith.

We don't yet know what TSS will let us export — so the plan doesn't depend on the answer. CSV and Excel upload is the default path; if a database or API turns out to be reachable, the same importer swaps its front end and everything downstream is unchanged.

Field mapping

Illustrative — the real map is produced in discovery and signed off before any load.

TSS · Customer master

Customers

Name, contacts, sites, terms, credit limit, TSS ID retained as legacy reference

TSS · Equipment / stock

Assets

Split into serialised units (chalets, stages) and bulk stock (fencing bays, blocks)

TSS · Rates

Rate cards

Day and week rates per product, plus customer-specific agreed pricing

TSS · Contracts

Hires

Header, lines, dates, delivery detail; historic contracts land read-only

TSS · Open items

Balances

Reconciled against Xero rather than imported blindly — Xero stays the source of truth

TSS · Documents

Attachments

PDFs and site plans attached to the customer or hire they belong to

Five phases, no big bang

01

Discovery and extraction test

Establish exactly what TSS can give us. Best case there's a reachable database or API; realistically it's CSV/Excel exports. We prove extraction on a sample before anything else is committed.

02

Map and dry run

Every TSS field is mapped to the new model and run through a validator. The dry run reports duplicates, missing terms, orphaned lines and bad dates — nothing is written until the report is clean and signed off.

03

Load and reconcile

Data is loaded into a staging environment. Counts and totals are reconciled against TSS and against Xero, category by category, with a sign-off sheet per entity.

04

Parallel run

One agreed period — ideally out of season — where new hires are entered in both systems. It costs a little double entry and buys certainty that nothing is missing.

05

Cutover and archive

TSS goes read-only. A final delta import catches anything entered during the parallel run, and TSS is archived as a static reference rather than switched off outright.

What we need from Eventmen

  • A TSS export of customers, equipment and contracts — whatever format it produces
  • Confirmation of who owns sign-off for each data set
  • Access to the Xero organisation for reconciliation (read-only is enough at first)
  • An agreed quiet window for the parallel run and cutover