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The TSS Importer - Your Data, Leveled Up

Moving inventory, customers and years of history off TSS and into 1sixty8 Manifold is a fifteen to thirty minute job now. Now what's your excuse?

By Mitch Schaffer

A shop owner in a black cap at a two-monitor workstation in a dark car audio shop, the old TSS system on the left screen and the same customer's record in 1sixty8 Manifold on the right. The headline reads 'Your TSS Data, Leveled Up', beside three lines: inventory, customers, years of history; cleaned up on the way; fifteen minutes, not a weekend.

In 29 years of running my shop, I never changed the point of sale software once. It wasn’t loyalty, and it wasn’t that nothing better existed. I wanted out of that system more times than I can count.

What stopped me was the data. Inventory, customer records, employee records and years of history were all sitting in there, and every time I got close to a decision I pictured the same thing: me in the office after close, the old system open on one screen and the new one on the other, typing customer phone numbers back in one at a time, knowing the digit I got wrong would be the one I needed six months later. So I stayed. There were better options in front of me, and I stayed anyway.

When I built 1sixty8 Manifold, I made an importer priority number one. Not something to add later. If a shop couldn’t get its history across, nothing else I built was going to matter much, because I knew exactly how that decision goes.

TSS has one of the largest installed bases in the 12-volt industry, so that is where I started. It started out being a no-go. The data wasn’t built to be read from outside of TSS, and for a while I thought we had picked the one problem we weren’t going to get past. Over time, we cracked the code and gained access to all of the underlying data.

What sits on top of that now is a detailed importer that:

  • brings across as much or as little of your TSS data as you want
  • cleans up a good deal of it on the way through, so what lands is more consistent and actually usable
  • in most cases, the migration is completed in fifteen minutes to a half an hour

No downtime. No weekend of typing. You log into 1sixty8 Manifold and your company’s history is sitting in there, organized and searchable, ready to work with the same day.

The data move is the part owners quietly stall on. I stalled on it for 29 years with better software in front of me the whole time. Whether you change systems is still a real decision with plenty to weigh, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But for shops currently on TSS, this particular part of it isn’t the wall it used to be. It’s an open door.

If you’re on TSS and want to see what your own inventory and customer history look like once they are migrated into 1sixty8 Manifold, send me a note. I look forward to speaking to you.