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.

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. 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.
2. Be the workspace owner or admin in JourneyFuse. The importer is owner/admin only. If you're an advisor on a team and want your own book brought over, ask your owner or admin to run it and file it under your name (step 4 below) — they don't have to hand you their login. 🚨 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.

The Walkthrough

1. Open the importer

Go to Settings → Data Import and click Open TESS importer in the green callout card at the bottom. Or visit /imports/tess directly.

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.

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
• 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.
• 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, email us the workbook and we'll do the whole migration for you as part of onboarding. 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):

Pattern matches	Imports as
client, contact, guest, traveler	Clients
trip, reservation	Trips
booking, sale	Bookings
payment, deposit, check	Payments
commission	Commissions
document, attachment, file	Documents

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 passport, birthday, and notes came over.
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. Email them over 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 client already matches on email, or on first + last name. 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.
• 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. Email us your export at support@journeyfuse.com and we'll do the whole migration manually as part of onboarding. Free, no time limit.

FAQ

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

I'm an advisor on a team, not the owner. How do I get my book over? Ask your owner or admin to open the importer, upload your TESS export, and set File this import under to your name. Your clients and trips arrive as yours, and your sales count as yours on reports and the leaderboard. Or send us the workbook and tell us whose book it is, and we'll run it for you. 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? No — owner or admin only. The importer creates new records workspace-wide, which is a privileged operation.