An Artlogic alternative that takes the whole export.

An Artlogic export runs past two hundred columns across a contact list and a checklist. Every one of them is read. The fields the system already understands become records you can filter and sort on day one; the rest stay attached to the record they came from, in full, until there is somewhere better for them to live.

That second half is the part usually lost in a move, because it is the part no importer has a field for:

• Provenance — chain of ownership as written
• Literature — citations and catalogue entries
• Exhibition history — where a work has hung
• Consignment terms — dates, splits, conditions
• Shipping logs — crates, carriers, addresses
• Condition notes — as recorded, not summarised
• Edition details — numbering, proofs, casts
• Framing and dimensions — framed and unframed
• Internal notes — whatever staff typed

Nothing in that list is summarised, truncated or dropped on the way in. A column we have no question for yet is still a column you can read on the record, and it is there when the question arrives.

The import keys on the record ids Artlogic already gave your works and your contacts, so a second run recognises what it wrote the first time and updates it rather than making a second copy. That is the difference between a migration you get one attempt at and one you can rehearse.

Which means the move is not a day. Import, read it, fix something at the source, import again — on a Tuesday, with the gallery still running on Artlogic, for as long as it takes to believe the result. Nothing is switched off because an import ran.

Everything that happens between a contact, a work and an event is written down as it happens — sending a PDF, building a checklist, raising an invoice — and every line names the member of staff who did it. Logging is never a separate step, so it never gets skipped, and the relationship stays the gallery’s when a director leaves.

Seeing a work and seeing its price are two different permissions, so an intern in one space and a freelancer at a fair can each be given the whole inventory and none of the money, without anybody maintaining a second price list to keep them apart.

Worth saying on this page in particular: the same thing is true of us. Every export is one you assemble yourself — choose the columns, read the rows on screen, take the file. It is a page in the system rather than a request to support.

If you are reading a page about leaving one system, you should know what leaving the next one looks like before you arrive, not after.