Post-migration data validation confirms your CRM data transferred accurately, key relationships are intact, automations fire correctly, and user access controls are properly configured. Run these 7 steps immediately after any CRM migration to catch errors before they corrupt live workflows, compromise reporting, or damage client relationships.

Step 1: Define Your Validation Scope and Success Criteria

Start by locking down exactly what data points matter most to your business before you touch a single record. Identify the key entities – contacts, companies, opportunities, custom objects – and the fields attached to each. Set hard thresholds for what counts as success: acceptable rates for missing values, required format standards, and zero-tolerance rules for orphaned records. A defined scope keeps the audit focused on high-impact areas and gives you a concrete benchmark for declaring the migration complete.

Step 2: Compare Source to Destination Data Samples

Pull a representative sample of records from your old CRM and compare them field-by-field against the corresponding records in the new system. Target random samples across record types, then hand-pick complex records, top accounts, and known edge cases. Check names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and any numeric values for truncation, corruption, or character encoding failures. Systemic issues surface at this stage – isolated errors are recoverable, but patterns signal something broke in the transfer logic itself.

Expert Take

Don’t sample easy records. Deliberately pull records with the most fields, the longest history, and the most complex ownership chains. Those expose migration tool failures – not the simple contacts most teams test first.

Step 3: Verify Data Relationships and Dependencies

CRM data lives in webs of relationships, and broken links between records are the most damaging migration failure you can leave undetected. Confirm that contacts connect to the right companies, opportunities link to the right contacts, activities attach to their parent records, and every custom relationship is re-established. Validate parent-child structures, lookup fields, and many-to-many connections. Migration tools handle flat records cleanly – they break on relational complexity. Catch it here before it corrupts reporting and triggers broken workflows downstream.

Step 4: Conduct User Acceptance Testing with Key Stakeholders

Get real users from different departments into the new CRM before you call it live. Have them run their actual daily workflows – create records, update fields, merge duplicates, pull reports, and exercise every integration they rely on. UAT surfaces what automated checks miss: a field that displays wrong in one department’s view, a filter that breaks a specific report, a workflow trigger that fires on the wrong condition. This is your last line of defense before full deployment, and skipping it is where migrations quietly fail.

Step 5: Validate Custom Fields, Automations, and Workflows

Custom fields and automations are where most CRM migrations break silently. Verify that every custom field carried over with the correct data type, constraints, and values – a text field that migrated as numeric breaks every automation that touches it. Test each automation end-to-end: lead assignment rules, email sequences, pipeline stage triggers, and data update workflows. Run them against real migrated records, not test data. Any misconfiguration here breaks critical business processes without surfacing an obvious error message.

For a deeper look at protecting data quality through major CRM transitions, see 13 Data Migration Mistakes That Damage Client Trust and 12 Strategies for Ironclad CRM Data Integrity.

Step 6: Perform Data Security and Access Checks

Security configuration doesn’t carry over automatically in most CRM migrations – it has to be rebuilt and verified from scratch. Review every user role, profile, and permission set to confirm sensitive data is locked down correctly in the new system. Test that users access only the records and fields their role authorizes, and that field-level restrictions required by compliance or internal policy are enforced. Run checks across multiple user accounts to confirm segregation of duties. An access error discovered after go-live is a compliance exposure, not just a configuration fix.

Expert Take

Permission errors are invisible to everyone except the person who shouldn’t have access. You won’t catch them from complaints – you have to test proactively with accounts representing every role in the system, including the most restricted ones. That’s the only way to verify segregation of duties actually holds.

Step 7: Document Findings and Execute a Remediation Plan

Every discrepancy you find gets documented, categorized by severity and operational impact, and assigned an owner before anyone touches a fix. Build a remediation plan that names the specific action, the person responsible, and a hard deadline – not a general cleanup initiative. Prioritize anything that halts operations or corrupts data integrity first. After each fix, re-test the affected area to confirm the resolution holds and didn’t introduce a new failure. The migration is not complete until every finding is resolved and re-verified.

If you’re preparing for an upcoming migration, start with 12 Steps to Flawless Data Before Your Keap CRM Migration to eliminate data quality problems before they transfer into your new system.