Migrating from TESS

If you're coming over from TESS (Travel eSolutions), you don't have to leave eight years of clients and trips behind. JourneyFuse has a dedicated TESS importer that reads the multi-sheet workbook TESS hands you and auto-detects each tab — clients, trips, bookings, payments, commissions, documents — with a side-by-side preview so you see exactly what's about to land in your workspace.

Nothing imports until you click Confirm. The whole first step is showing you what we found.

Or Let Us Do It — Free

You can run the importer yourself with the walkthrough below, but you don't have to. We do the migration for you, free, with no time limit. Open a migration request and send us your TESS files — attach them to the request, or reply to the ticket email with them. We analyze everything and build you a migration dashboard right inside your support ticket: what we found (clients, trips, bookings and their value), any questions that need your input — each with our suggested handling, so answering is usually one click — and live progress through every stage. Nothing is imported until you review the plan and click Approve & start import, and when the import finishes you get a final summary to confirm before we call it done.

This is the right path for the awkward files too: the hand-built workbooks with surprise tab names, the agency-wide exports that need splitting by advisor, and the document bundles the workbook can't carry.

Start your free migration

Before You Start

1. Get the two exports out of TESS. There is no single "export everything" button, and the custom reports list is short — most agencies have three. Ask for these two, because each one does a job the other can't:

   • Your clients, with the email column. The quickest route is the one TESS documents: open your client list, click Import/Export in the upper right, then Export to Excel. It downloads as client.export.date.MM.DD.YYYY.xlsx. Some agencies also have a custom report along the lines of "Clients on trips", which has the advantage of tying each client to their trips. Either works, as long as email is on it — we match clients on email address, and that column is what stops a second copy of someone already in your account.
   • A bookings and payments workbook — bookings, a payments tab with one row per payment, and a client notes tab. This one usually isn't in the reports list. Request it from TESS support, and give them lead time: one agency requested theirs on a Thursday and had it the following Wednesday.

   🚨 That workbook is built by hand at TESS, so you get exactly the tabs you asked for — name all three. Four of these have come through us and no two matched: one arrived as a single flat sheet with no payments at all, one had bookings and client notes but no payments tab, and two had all three. One even spelled a tab "CLient Notes". Write the request as "bookings, payments (one row per payment), and client notes, as three tabs in one workbook" rather than "a bookings report", or you can wait a week and get a file with no payment history in it.

2. Be an owner, admin or advisor in JourneyFuse. An owner or admin can import for anyone on the team (step 4 below). An advisor imports their own book: everything files under your name, it is matched only against your own clients and trips, and your owner gets a note of what came in. 🚨 A TESS report is filtered to whoever is logged in. Every row comes out under that person's name, so an owner's export contains the owner's book and nobody else's. For a multi-advisor agency, either each advisor runs their own reports, or the owner asks TESS for one agency-wide copy — those carry an Agent Name column on every row, and we can split it by agent and file each person's clients and sales under their own name in a single pass. The agency-wide request is much faster than queueing advisors up one at a time.

3. Make sure you're in the right workspace. Imports land in whichever workspace is active when you upload — check the workspace switcher in the top-left.

Which TESS Report Carries What

TESS report names follow a dot-date convention, so you can tell them apart by filename before you open anything. This table is built from the real exports agencies have sent us, not from the TESS documentation.

Three of these are worth calling out, because they look more useful than they are:

• The client export has no passport data. It is 13 columns and passport is not one of them, whatever else you may have read. If passports matter to you, they have to come from the bookings workbook's notes tab or be re-entered.
• Commission.Received cannot be attached to anything. It is a list of cheques with no booking number on any row, so it can tell you what you were paid in total but it can't put commission against the trip that earned it. Rolling.Commission.Earned is the one that can.
• Final Payment Balance only exports active bookings, so everything on it reads as still in progress. Import it alone and trips that travelled two years ago arrive as though they are still being planned. Send it alongside a report with real trip statuses, or tell us and we'll date-check them on the way in.

The Walkthrough

1. Open the importer

Go to Settings → Data Import and, in the Trips row, click TESS importer. Or visit /imports/tess directly. Advisors see this too: an advisor's import files everything under their own name.

2. Drop your file

Drag your TESS .xlsx onto the upload card, or click Choose file. The importer parses every sheet client-side — your file never leaves your browser until you confirm.

3. Review the auto-detected sheets

We classify each tab by its name first, then fill any gaps from its columns. That second part matters on the flat exports TESS also produces, where a single Bookings tab carries the trip, the booking and the payment columns side by side — that one sheet feeds all three passes rather than being treated as bookings alone.

You'll see a totals strip at the top (Clients, Trips, Bookings, Payments, Commissions, Documents) with row counts per category, and below it one card per sheet with:

• Sheet name + the JourneyFuse category we mapped it to (color-coded badge)
• Detected columns — the first dozen header names from your sheet
• Row count — total rows in the sheet
• Sample rows — the first 5 rows shown as a table so you can sanity-check the data

Sheets we don't recognize show up as Unmapped with a gray badge — they'll be skipped on import. If you see something important marked unmapped, the sheet name probably doesn't match our patterns; rename it in Excel and re-upload, or tell us what to add.

4. Choose whose book this is

If your workspace has more than one advisor, the preview card carries a File this import under dropdown. It defaults to you. Pick a teammate and the clients and trips in that workbook are assigned to them instead, so their sales count as theirs on reports and the sales leaderboard.

An agency-wide workbook does not need the dropdown at all: when a row carries an Agent Name, that row is filed under the teammate it names, and the dropdown only covers rows with no name or a name that matches nobody on your team. Names that matched nobody are listed on the results screen so you can invite them or reassign afterwards.

This is how a team migrates a multi-advisor agency: one workbook per advisor, filed under that advisor, rather than one giant import that credits everything to whoever happened to run it.

5. Confirm

A sticky bar at the bottom shows Preview only — nothing is imported until you confirm. Hit Confirm import when you're ready. We'll process and show a success bar listing exactly what landed.

What Gets Imported

We import:

• Clients — first/last name, email, phone, address, birthday, anniversary, passport number, passport expiry, notes. That is what the importer accepts; what actually lands depends on your file. TESS's own client export carries only the first four of those, so passport and anniversary arrive empty unless they come from another sheet.
• Trips — name, destination, start/end dates, total price, status
• Bookings — supplier, booking type, confirmation number, travel dates, price, deposit, notes, ship or property name. Each booking attaches to its trip, matched by trip name or by the booking's own confirmation number.
• The date each booking was sold — read from the Booking Date column. If a row has none, the import uses the payment date on that row, and failing that the date TESS created the record. A travel date is never used as the sale date, and neither is today. A booking with none of the three arrives with no sale date at all, and the results screen counts those: these will count from the day they arrived on your dashboards and reports until you open each one and set the date it was sold.
• Payments — the whole ledger, not just a deposit. TESS revisits the same booking across many rows, so each money column becomes its own payment and the booking's paid total and balance are recomputed from them. The trip's final payment date is filled in too.
• Commissions — a commission amount on a booking or commission row creates the matching commission entry, so your historical earnings land with the booking rather than needing a separate CSV pass.

We skip:

• Documents — the export lists attachment filenames with no files behind them, so there is nothing for us to store. They show in the preview and are reported as skipped rather than counted as imported. Send us your TESS document bundle and we'll upload them for you.
• Invoices — TESS doesn't export these in a shape we can bring across. Your bookings arrive with their prices, payments and balances intact, so the money is all there and correct, but an imported trip has no invoice document on it. Build those in JourneyFuse for the trips that still need one, which in practice means upcoming travel rather than years of closed history.

Client notes need their own tab. TESS keeps the "Additional Notes" cheat sheet apart from the contact details, so it isn't in the client report — it arrives on the notes tab of the bookings and payments workbook. If your notes matter to you, and they usually do, make sure that workbook is one of the files you send.

Every pass reports itself: the summary after an import lists what was created, what was skipped, and the reason for each skip, so a sheet that matched nothing tells you why instead of quietly reading as success.

If your export has an unusual shape, or you'd rather not run it yourself, open a migration request and attach the workbook (or reply to the ticket email with it) — we'll do the whole migration for you as part of onboarding, with the dashboard and approval steps described above. Free, no time limit.

Column Mapping Heuristics

The importer recognizes common header variants without you mapping them by hand. For clients, any of these work:

• first_name / first / fname / given_name
• last_name / last / lname / surname
• email / email_address / primary_email
• phone / phone_number / mobile / cell
• birthday / date_of_birth / dob
• passport_number / passport
• passport_expiry / passport_expiration

For trips:

• name / trip_name / description / title
• destination / location
• start_date / travel_start / departure / depart_date
• end_date / travel_end / return / return_date
• total / total_price / package_price / amount

Dates are auto-handled — both ISO strings (2026-05-28) and Excel serial numbers come through correctly. Dollar signs and commas are stripped from numbers before parsing.

Sheet Name Patterns

We detect what kind of data a tab holds by matching its name (case-insensitive):

Anything else lands in Unmapped.

After the Import

1. Spot-check a few clients. Open /clients and look up a recent traveler by name. Verify their birthday, address and notes came over. Passport will be empty if all you sent was the TESS client export, and that is the export doing what it does rather than the import failing.
2. Trip ownership. Imported trips go to whoever you picked in File this import under, which defaults to the person running the import. If a batch landed on the wrong advisor, go to /trips and reassign — or use the bulk reassign action on /settings/agents.
3. Document your trip history. A TESS status maps onto ours by intent, and anything we don't recognise arrives as Planning rather than a lead, so it stays visible in your trip views. Bulk-update statuses on /trips if you want older trips to read as "closed".
4. Send us the document bundle. Attachments are the one thing the workbook can't carry. Attach them to your migration ticket (or reply to the ticket email with them) and we'll load them onto the right records.

Pitfalls

• Reversed date columns. If TESS exports MM/DD/YYYY and your spreadsheet locale is DD/MM/YYYY, dates can flip. Spot-check one or two trips after import. If they look off, send us the file — we'll re-import with the right format.
• Duplicate clients. Re-running the importer does not double your roster: a row matches an existing client on first + last name, or on the same email or phone when the name is a variant of theirs ("Brad" for "Bradley", a middle name added, "LaFalce" for "La Falce"). A generational suffix (Jr, II) or a different birthday keeps two records apart. If two people genuinely share a name, use Clients → Find Duplicates afterward to merge.
• Trips you've already created by hand. A trip is matched by name, and failing that by any booking confirmation number it carries — so a trip you filed as "Rich Hard Rock Riviera Maya" is recognised even though TESS calls it "Rich - HRRM - June 2026". Those show in the summary as matched a trip you already have, and their bookings attach to the trip you already had rather than to an empty copy of it.
• Bookings with no sale date. Sales reports and the dashboard place a booking in the month it was sold. Where your export carried no booking date, payment date or created date, the booking counts from the day it was imported, and the results screen tells you how many landed that way. If your TESS report has a booking-date column under a different heading, rename it to Booking Date and run the import again — a re-run fills in blanks without duplicating anything.
• Excel serial dates pre-1900. Excel can't represent dates before 1900; if a client's birthday is listed as 1899-12-31, it's a default value in the source file, not real data.

Getting Help

The importer covers most cases — but if your TESS export has unusual sheet shapes (custom fields, branded templates, decade-old archive sheets), don't fight it solo. Open a migration request and attach your export — or email it to support@journeyfuse.com — and we'll do the whole migration for you as part of onboarding, with a dashboard in your ticket showing progress and nothing imported until you approve. Free, no time limit.

FAQ

Will my passport scans and insurance docs come over? Not from the workbook. The export only lists attachment filenames, not the files themselves. Send your TESS document bundle to support and we'll handle the upload as a one-time service.

Will my passport numbers come over? Not from the TESS client export, which is 13 columns and carries none. The importer reads passport number and expiry when a sheet has them, so they arrive if your bookings workbook includes a client tab that does. Worth asking TESS for when you request that workbook.

I'm an advisor on a team, not the owner. How do I get my book over? Open the importer yourself from Settings → Data Import and upload your TESS export. Everything files under your name, it is matched only against your own clients and trips, and your owner gets a note of what came in. Your sales count as yours on reports and the leaderboard. Before you import, the importer shows your client email setting and offers to switch it to Testing mode, so no client is emailed about a trip they already took. Switch back to Sending once you have checked what arrived. Your owner or admin can also run it for you and set File this import under to your name, or send us the workbook. Pull the export from your own TESS login, not theirs — a TESS report comes out filtered to whoever ran it.

My agency already migrated, but I can't find my clients. Did they not come over? Probably not what's happening. If your agency imported one workbook covering everybody, those records were filed under whoever the import was assigned to, and an advisor account only shows the clients and trips assigned to you. So your own clients can be sitting in the account and stay invisible from your login no matter how you search. Ask your owner or admin to search for one of them, and if they're there, ask us to move them onto your name rather than importing a second copy of everyone.

⚠️ Don't re-enter clients by hand while you wait. A client typed in fresh is a new record, not a match against the one already there, so you end up with two of the same person on two different advisors. Those merge cleanly afterward, but it's a chore nobody needs.

Can I re-import the same file twice? Yes. Every record is matched before it is written — clients on email or name, trips on name or booking number, bookings on their confirmation number — so a second run creates nothing new. The summary tells you exactly what was skipped and why.

What if my TESS sheet uses different column names than your heuristics? Two paths: rename the columns in Excel before uploading (fastest), or tell us the headers and we'll add them to the matcher.

Does this work for non-TESS exports? Mostly yes — anything with similar sheet names (Clients / Trips / Bookings) will be detected. ClientEase and Tres Technologies exports usually map cleanly. For Tern, use Settings → Data Import → CSV which has Tern-specific auto-detection.

Can support staff or agents run the importer? Advisors can, into their own book only. Support staff can't, because the importer creates records.