Migrate from Bill4Time to Nutshell

Nutshell has no billing or invoicing module — invoice history cannot be migrated as live records

Bill4Time invoices track prebill, finalized, and paid status with associated labor amounts, expense totals, and payment history. Nutshell's CRM model has no invoice object at all — Deals track revenue and pipeline status but not billing state. We preserve Bill4Time invoice status, outstanding balance, and amounts as custom fields on the linked Nutshell Deal for reconciliation reference, but you cannot generate invoices from Nutshell without a separate accounting integration. If your firm relies on Bill4Time's invoice generation for client billing, that workflow must be handled outside Nutshell post-migration.

Bill4Time's read-only API requires export-before-migration for large time entry volumes

Bill4Time's public API is read-only in both v1 and v2 — FlitStack cannot write back to Bill4Time during migration, which is expected and appropriate. However, the API applies rate limits on find queries with non-stub responses, and time entry exports with large result sets may require pagination or multiple filtered requests. We handle this by using Bill4Time's OData-style $filter and $top parameters to page through time entries efficiently. Import minimums in Bill4Time's own import tool (50-row minimum for projects, 100-row minimum for time entries) do not apply to our API-based migration, but data cleanliness checks are run against these thresholds to flag gaps before mapping.

Bill4Time Enterprise Add-On custom fields are not available on lower-tier accounts

Custom fields in Bill4Time — the primary extensibility mechanism for Client, Project, Time Entry, and User — require the Enterprise Add-On. Firms on the Legal Pro or lower plans have no custom fields in Bill4Time, meaning any migration plan that assumes custom property mapping will find those fields absent. We audit custom field availability during discovery. Nutshell, by contrast, includes custom fields on all plans for Company, Person, Lead, and Deal — so a firm upgrading Bill4Time solely to unlock custom fields before migration may find the same capability available natively in Nutshell without an add-on cost.

Nutshell's per-contact-contact-role model differs from Bill4Time's N:N matter associations

Bill4Time allows a single client to have multiple projects, and time entries link directly to both client and project independently. Nutshell's Deals sit under Companies, and the CRM's contact model uses a Company → Person relationship with optional Account Contact Relationships for multi-company associations. We map each Bill4Time client → Nutshell Company and each project → Nutshell Deal on that Company. Time entries link to the Deal via a custom field since Nutshell Activities are not natively tied to Deals in the same way Bill4Time entries are tied to projects. This means viewing a Bill4Time matter's full time history in Nutshell requires navigating to the linked Deal's activity custom field rather than a native matter record.

Nutshell's API impersonation mode must be enabled for owner-resolved migrations

Nutshell's JSON-RPC API supports impersonation — when enabled on an API key, actions are logged under the impersonated user's name rather than the API key's name. For accurate owner resolution, we recommend enabling impersonation on the migration API key so Bill4Time user IDs map to the correct Nutshell owner. If impersonation is not permitted on your Nutshell API key, all migrated records will be attributed to the API key itself rather than individual owners, which affects activity attribution and Deal assignment visibility in Nutshell's reporting.