How to migrate from Smartsheet to Tallyfy

If you’re thinking about leaving Smartsheet, the most useful thing you can do first has nothing to do with exporting. It’s sorting. Smartsheet is a grid, and a grid will happily hold two completely different kinds of work that look identical on screen.

Here’s the honest version up front. A sheet where each row is a step in a sequence, and the whole thing repeats, is a process, and it maps onto Tallyfy cleanly. A sheet where each row is a record you look things up in, with formulas across cells, is a spreadsheet, and you should keep it in a spreadsheet. Most Smartsheet migrations go sideways because someone tries to move the spreadsheets too. So the real first step is deciding which is which, and it’s the same instinct behind moving teams who are tired of tracking work in spreadsheets toward something that actually runs the process. That sorting decision sits underneath most workflow software moves.

Why teams move off Smartsheet

Smartsheet is a capable tool, and I’ll say that plainly, because a migration guide that pretends the thing you’re leaving is junk helps nobody. Smartsheet gives you spreadsheet power with project features bolted on: formulas, Gantt charts, cross-sheet references, automations, and a grid that anyone who knows Excel can pick up in an afternoon. For teams that genuinely think in rows and columns, that familiarity is the whole appeal.

The friction shows up somewhere specific. It shows up when a grid is asked to enforce a process.

The two reasons teams start looking both come from that mismatch. The first is that a spreadsheet doesn’t insist on anything. A row can sit half-finished with no owner, the next step can be skipped, and the sheet won’t object, because a grid records state, it doesn’t drive work forward.

The second is that the workaround sprawls. To make a sheet behave like a workflow, you stack automations, conditional formatting, update requests, and helper columns until the thing is fragile and only its author understands it. For work that has to run the same way every time, that scaffolding is the problem, not the solution.

What Smartsheet’s export actually gives you

Start here, because the export reality sets the whole plan. Smartsheet lets you export a sheet to Excel, Google Sheets, or PDF from the File menu, and the grid comes across as a grid. So the raw data of any sheet is easy to get out.

Now read the limits, because they tell you what a CSV-style export can’t carry. Smartsheet is direct that formulas aren’t preserved, because of the differences between Excel and Smartsheet formula syntax, and that groupings, summary rows, and attachments are excluded from the export. Comments land on a separate tab rather than next to the row they belong to. So you keep the values, not the logic that produced them and not the conversation around them.

If you want a complete, structured pull, the path is the Smartsheet REST API, a REST API at version 2.0 that lets you programmatically access and manage sheets, rows, columns, and more. For most migrations you don’t script against it. You export the sheets you’ve decided are real processes, keep the old Smartsheet account read-only as your archive, and rebuild those processes fresh.

How Smartsheet concepts map to Tallyfy

This is the part people worry about, and the trick is that one Smartsheet concept, the row, maps to two different Tallyfy objects depending on what the row really is. Get that right and the rest follows.

The mental shift is from a grid to a flow. In Smartsheet you scan a sheet top to bottom and read state across columns. In Tallyfy you follow a process step by step, and each run moves through it once. The data survives the move. The free-form grid where you could type anything into any cell does not, and for a repeatable process that constraint is a feature, because it’s what stops rows from sitting half-done.

Make it concrete with contract renewals. In Smartsheet, that often lives as one big sheet: each row is a contract, with columns for the vendor, the renewal date, the owner, a status with colored balls, and an update request that pings the owner when a decision is due. It looks like a workflow, but it’s a record list with manual nudges stapled on. Migrate it the right way and each contract row becomes its own running process, kicked off a set number of days before the renewal date, with steps for review, an approval step that actually blocks until someone decides to renew or cancel, and a clear view of every active renewal at once. The sheet was tracking the work. The blueprint runs it.

A realistic migration timeline

Anyone who promises a one-weekend migration is selling something. A real move runs about five to six weeks, and for Smartsheet the first week carries more weight than usual.

Week one is the audit, and it’s the most important week of the whole project. Go sheet by sheet and put each into one of two piles: this is a process, or this is a spreadsheet. The test is simple. Does this sheet drive a sequence of steps that repeats, or does it hold records you read and calculate against? Only the first pile migrates. Be honest here, because moving a spreadsheet into a workflow tool helps nobody, and Smartsheet stays a perfectly good home for the genuine spreadsheets.

Week two, rebuild your top three process sheets as Tallyfy blueprints. Not thirty. Three. Pick the ones that hurt most when a row gets skipped, and define them properly, with owners, order, and the approvals that matter. Week three is a parallel run: have one or two teams run the new Tallyfy process alongside the old sheet, so you catch the gaps while the safety net is still there.

Week four, switch your power users over fully and set the old sheets read-only. Weeks five and six, bring the rest of the team across and keep Smartsheet only for the sheets that were always spreadsheets.

Why so deliberate?

Because the goal isn’t to rebuild your sheets in a new tool. It’s to find the handful that were always processes pretending to be grids, and let them finally run as processes.

What breaks, and what Tallyfy won’t replace

Let’s be specific about what goes wrong, because every migration hits a few of these. Cross-sheet references and INDEX/MATCH formulas have no equivalent in a workflow tool, so they either go static or break, and you document the logic in the step instead. Cell-level comments and proofing don’t migrate cleanly. Grid users expect to type into any cell and instead get a guided sequence, which is the paradigm shift and the retraining cost. And anything built on Control Center or Dynamic View is out of scope for a process migration.

Now the honest part, the section most migration guides skip. There are things Smartsheet does that Tallyfy does not.

Smartsheet is a spreadsheet at heart, and Tallyfy is not. Formulas across cells, pivots, the grid math, the Gantt scheduling, and the resource views have no equivalent in a tool built to run one process well. A mistake we watch teams make is trying to move the calculation-heavy sheets too, then feeling let down when the formulas don’t come along. They were never supposed to. If your team needs grid math, keep Smartsheet for the spreadsheet sheets and move only the workflow sheets across. Plenty of teams run both, Smartsheet for the analysis and tracking grids, Tallyfy for the processes that have to run the same way every time.

A workflow engine that runs the process, not a grid that records it.

The thing teams expect to lose and don’t is reporting. In Smartsheet you build a dashboard or a report as a separate object pointed at your sheets. In Tallyfy, the live status view is built in, so every run shows up sitting on a named step without you wiring up a reporting layer. The constraint you were nervous about, losing the free-form grid, is what makes the status legible, and rebuilding automations as Tallyfy rules is usually quick once the process is clear.

Common questions about migrating from Smartsheet

If you’re still deciding rather than ready to move, our Smartsheet alternative comparison covers why teams switch, feature by feature. This guide is the how-to-move companion to it.

When you’re ready to plan the actual move, the fastest first step is a short call where we look at your current Smartsheet setup and tell you honestly which sheets are real processes worth migrating and which should stay as spreadsheets.

Book a 30-minute migration walkthrough and bring your two or three busiest sheets. That’s the quickest way to see whether this is a fit.