A garage with eight hundred vehicles on the books earns a meaningful share of its year from whoever contacts the customer first about an MOT. That is the thing at risk when you change systems, and it is a different risk from the one a salon runs. Losing a phone number is annoying. Losing the date a car is due back is money. So this page starts with the vehicles and the dates, then covers what the Youzse importer reads, what genuinely does not travel, what breaks on the day and last of all how to hand the reminder queue across.
What moves and what stays behind
| Comes across | What to watch | |
|---|---|---|
| Customer records | Names, email addresses, phone numbers, addresses and notes, from a customer list exported to a spreadsheet | There is no named column profile for Garage Hive, so you match the columns yourself on the mapping screen. Youzse guesses the pairing from your headings and shows you every guess before anything is written |
| Trade and fleet accounts | Company name, address, phone, email and the company registration number, imported as companies and then linked to their contacts | Import the companies before the people, because a contact attaches to a company that already exists rather than creating one |
| Vehicle records | Not as a file. Youzse has no vehicle import, and this sounds worse than it is | Vehicles are created from the registration instead. The plate lookup fills make, model, colour, year, fuel type and engine size, so a list of registrations against customers is the only thing you genuinely need to carry |
| MOT due dates | Read from the plate rather than trusted from your export | This is the part people expect to be hardest and it is the easiest. The next MOT due date, the MOT status and the test history come back from the registration, so a stale date in an old system does not follow you across |
| Job history | As invoices. Invoice number, issue date, due date, customer, totals and status | Job card detail is not invoice detail. Technician notes, times booked against a job and the line by line work record stay in Garage Hive, so keep a read only export of them |
| Parts and stock | No | This is the one Garage Hive holds better than most and the one you lose most of. Bin locations, stock levels, supplier part numbers and costs are not importable and the Youzse parts catalogue is built again by hand |
| Open purchase orders | No | Anything already raised with a factor has to be tracked outside the system until it lands. Close what you can before you move and keep a printed list of the rest |
| Booked in work | As appointments, with date, time, customer, service, technician and status | A booking needs its customer, its service and its technician to exist in Youzse first, so appointments are the last file you upload rather than the first |
| Saved card details | No | Card details sit with the payment processor behind your old platform rather than in a spreadsheet, so customers enter a card again the first time they pay through Youzse |
Garage Hive is built on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, which means most list pages export to Excel properly rather than grudgingly. That is a real advantage on the way out and it is worth using while the licence is still live. Nothing in this table is a claim about what Garage Hive will hand over on any given day, so look at the export you actually get before you plan around it.
What the Youzse importer reads, said plainly
Youzse imports customers, companies, services, staff, appointments, quotes and invoices from spreadsheets. Each file goes through the same four steps: read the file, match the columns, show you a preview and then commit the batch. Before a batch is written Youzse looks for records that already match so the same customer is not created twice, and after it is written the whole batch can be rolled back, which turns a mapping mistake into a few minutes rather than an evening.
There is no named column profile for Garage Hive, so you match the columns yourself. The mapping screen puts your headings on one side and the Youzse fields on the other, guesses the obvious pairings from the heading text and leaves you to confirm or change them. A customer list takes a few minutes. Nobody should promise you a one click import from Garage Hive, including us.
Vehicles are the exception and the good news. They are not a file you upload. You add a vehicle to a customer by typing the registration, and the lookup fills the make, the model, the colour, the year, the fuel type, the engine size, the MOT status, the next MOT due date and the test history from the plate. That means the accuracy of your vehicle data on day one does not depend on the quality of your old export at all.
What does not survive the move
Stock is the big one and Garage Hive is strong at it. Business Central underneath means real stock control, bin locations, costing and supplier records, and none of that comes across. The Youzse parts catalogue, part requests with approval and purchase orders against suppliers you set up yourself are a simpler shape of the same idea, and simpler is only an improvement if the depth was not earning its keep.
The Garage Hive user community goes too, and it is worth naming rather than skipping over. A busy forum where other garages answer each other is a genuine part of what you are paying for, and swapping it for a support inbox is a downgrade on the days you need it.
Then there are the things that were never records in the first place. Reminder wording, reminder timing, deposit rules, vehicle health check templates, technician rates and document layouts are settings rather than rows, so no export carries them and they are rebuilt wherever you go. Screenshot them while your Garage Hive licence is still live rather than working from memory afterwards.
Your switching checklist
- Export customers, trade accounts, job history and invoices to Excel while the Garage Hive licence is still paid, because a closed account is a request rather than a download
- Pull a single list of registration against customer name. That one file is the spine of the whole move
- Screenshot your reminder timings, your vehicle health check templates, your labour rates and your document layouts
- Write down your stock on hand and your open purchase orders, because neither is importable
- Start the Youzse trial, which runs 30 days with no card, and upload customers and trade accounts first
- Add vehicles by registration, working down your MOT due dates from the soonest, not alphabetically
- Import services, then staff, then invoices, then booked in work, because each of those needs the records above it to exist
- Run both systems through a full MOT reminder cycle before you cancel anything
- Change your booking links and your website booking button last, once the workshop board is one you would trust on a Monday morning
What breaks on the day, and what to do about it
Booked in jobs do not move themselves. Import the appointment file so the board is not empty, then walk the next fortnight by eye against a printout from the old system. A car arriving on a day nobody has a record of is the only failure in this whole move that a customer ever sees.
Parts on order are the second trap. A purchase order raised in Garage Hive is invisible to Youzse, so the part turns up with nothing to book it against. Keep a paper list on the counter until every open order has landed and been fitted.
Courtesy car bookings are the third, and they are the easiest to forget because they are usually held loosely in the first place. Youzse has no courtesy car record, so block the vehicle out in the diary as a booking against its own registration and treat it like any other job. It is a workaround and we would rather write that than let you find out in week two.
On cards, Youzse is 2.5% plus 35p per transaction with our platform fee inside that single rate. Garage Hive publishes no card processing rate on its pricing page, so there is no published comparison to make and you will have to read your own merchant statements to know whether you are paying more.
The MOT reminder cutover, which is the part that costs money
Here is the mechanic of it, because it matters more than any feature list. Youzse sends an MOT reminder on the exact day a vehicle hits one of its reminder stops. You set the lead time for the first one, which defaults to 30 days and can be anywhere from 7 to 90, and the follow ups trail it at 14 days, 7 days and the expiry date itself. There are further notices after expiry at 1, 7 and 14 days.
The consequence is simple and it catches people out. If a vehicle is not in Youzse on the day its stop falls, it gets nothing. Youzse does not send a retrospective reminder to a car you added last week for a stop that passed a fortnight ago. Add a vehicle three weeks before its MOT and it has already missed the 30 day reminder for good.
So load by due date, not alphabetically. Take every vehicle due in the next three months and put those registrations in first, before anything else in this whole project. Then keep Garage Hive reminding as well, for one full cycle, and accept that a handful of customers get told twice. A customer hearing twice is mildly irritating. A customer hearing nothing goes to the fast fit place on the bypass and you never find out why.
One thing that does work in your favour. Because the due date is read from the plate rather than from your spreadsheet, a vehicle that was wrong in Garage Hive does not arrive wrong in Youzse. Plenty of garages find the cutover is the first time in years their MOT dates have been right.
Third-party pricing and features on this page were last checked on 10 August 2026. Rival platforms change their plans, so check their own site before you decide.
Keep reading
Leaving Fresha without losing your client list
What comes out of Fresha, what the Youzse importer reads, what does not survive the move and what to do about the booking links you have already given out.
Switching from Booksy, step by step
A running order for moving off Booksy: what to export, what the Youzse importer maps, what your bill looks like after and which links you must change.
Leaving Treatwell and taking your data with you
Treatwell says you still own your data if you cancel and that it does not sync with other systems. What both mean in practice when you move to Youzse.