Switching from My Garage CRM without a gap in the reminders

My Garage CRM will get you onto its system and it says so on its own pages. The useful trick is to ask for the same help on the way out, in writing, before you give any notice. Here is everything else the move involves.

8 min readUpdated 20 September 2026

Ask for the export first and ask in writing. My Garage CRM publicly offers onboarding and migration help to businesses joining it, which tells you the staff and the tooling to produce a clean data file exist. A polite request for a full export of your customers, your vehicles, your job history and your invoices, made while your account is still paid and before you have mentioned leaving, is the single highest value thing you can do today. Everything below assumes you have that file.

What moves and what stays behind

Comes acrossWhat to watch
Customer recordsNames, email addresses, phone numbers, addresses and notesThere is no named column profile for My Garage CRM, so you match the columns yourself. Youzse guesses the obvious pairings from your headings and shows you every guess before writing
Trade and fleet accountsCompany name, registration number, VAT number, address, phone and email, as companiesImport companies first, then the people who belong to them
Registrations and vehiclesAs a list of plates against customers, not as a vehicle importYouzse builds the vehicle from the registration, filling make, model, colour, year, fuel type and engine size, so the plate list is the only vehicle data worth asking for
MOT due datesRead from the plate, not from the exportWhatever the old system holds, Youzse takes the current due date, the MOT status and the test history from the registration
Job historyAs invoices with number, issue date, due date, customer, totals, amount paid and statusThe job card underneath does not travel. Keep a read only export of labour lines, technician notes and parts fitted
Marketing and campaign historyNoAnything the system sent on your behalf, and any record of who opened it, stays behind. Marketing consent is the field to check by hand, because guessing at consent is a data protection problem rather than an inconvenience
Anything a model producedNoSummaries, suggested follow ups and generated text are outputs of their system rather than records of your business. Treat them as gone and do not plan around them
Parts and stockNoRebuild the Youzse parts catalogue for the lines you turn over rather than recreating everything
Saved card detailsNoCard 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

My Garage CRM publishes from £139 a month on its pricing page. Nothing else in this table is a claim about what it 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

Youzse imports customers, companies, services, staff, appointments, quotes and invoices from spreadsheets, and every file runs the same four steps: read the file, match the columns, preview the result, commit the batch. Duplicate checking runs before anything is written and a committed batch can be rolled back in one action, so a first attempt is safe to make.

There is no named column profile for My Garage CRM, so you match the columns yourself. The mapping screen lists your headings beside the Youzse fields, guesses the pairings it recognises from the wording and asks you to confirm. That is a few minutes rather than a project, but it is not a one click import and this page is not going to call it one.

Vehicles are the exception, and it is the exception that makes a garage move tolerable. You do not import them. You type the registration against the customer and Youzse 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. The record then follows that registration if the car changes hands.

Your switching checklist

  • Ask My Garage CRM in writing for a full export of customers, vehicles, job history and invoices, while your account is still paid and before you mention leaving
  • Ask specifically for registration against customer as its own list, sorted by MOT due date if they will do it
  • Screenshot your reminder wording and timings, your labour rates and your vehicle health check sheets, none of which are records
  • Check what marketing consent you actually hold, rather than assuming the whole list is contactable
  • Start the Youzse trial, which runs 30 days with no card, and import companies, then customers
  • Add vehicles by registration, everything due in the next three months first
  • Import services, then staff, then invoices, then booked in work
  • Run both systems through one full MOT reminder cycle before you cancel
  • Change your booking links and your website booking button last

What breaks on the day, and what to do about it

Booked in jobs need checking by eye. Import the appointment file, print the next fortnight from the old system and walk the two against each other. It takes twenty minutes and it is the only part of this a customer would ever notice going wrong.

Parts already on order have no purchase order in Youzse to land against, so keep a written list by the counter and stop raising new orders in the old system a fortnight before the switch.

Courtesy car bookings have no record type of their own. Block the vehicle out in the diary as a booking against its own registration and it behaves like any other job on the board. It is a workaround rather than a feature.

Any automated follow up the old system was sending stops the day the account does. Rebuild the sequences you actually valued in Youzse during the overlap, while you can still see how the originals were worded.

The MOT reminder cutover, and the price question

Youzse sends an MOT reminder on the exact day a vehicle reaches a reminder stop. The first is a lead time you choose, defaulting to 30 days and adjustable between 7 and 90, with follow ups at 14 days, 7 days and the expiry date, then post expiry notices at 1, 7 and 14 days. Nothing is sent twice for the same stop.

The flip side is the part to plan around. A vehicle not in Youzse on the day its stop falls gets nothing, and there is no retrospective send to catch it later. Load by due date rather than alphabetically, put everything due in the next three months in first and keep the old system reminding alongside for one complete cycle. A customer hearing twice shrugs. A customer hearing nothing books somewhere else.

On money, the two halves point different ways and both are worth stating. My Garage CRM publishes from £139 a month and Youzse is from £59 a month, with VAT treatment set out on the Youzse pricing page, so on subscription we are the cheaper of the two. Against that, Youzse card processing is 2.5% plus 35p per transaction with our platform fee inside that single rate, and My Garage CRM publishes no card rate at all, so that side cannot be compared from published figures and you will need your own merchant statements to settle it.

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.

Clear answers before you switch

The details that usually slow down a move: setup, pricing, bookings, records and how Youzse fits into your day.

Ask for it in writing, while your account is still paid and before you have mentioned leaving. My Garage CRM publicly offers onboarding and migration help to businesses joining it, so the staff and the tooling to produce a clean data file exist. Ask for customers, trade accounts, vehicles with their registrations, job history and invoices, and ask for the registration against customer list separately because that is the one the whole move hangs on.

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