Getting your data out of E2®, JobBOSS®, Made2Manage®, Global Shop Solutions®, or Fulcrum®

Shops leave these systems for different reasons — a forced cloud move, per-seat pricing, a vendor that stopped investing. Whatever the reason, the first practical question is the same: can I get my data out? The answer is yes for all five, but the difficulty varies a lot. Every extract needs the same three things — access to the raw data, export to CSV or Excel, and the table layouts — so that's how we'll grade each system.

E2 Shop System (Shoptech)

Older E2 installs (the 6.0/7.x era) keep the entire company in one Microsoft Access database — a file named BLSDATA.MDB in the E2 data folder. That's genuinely good news: copy that file while everyone's logged out and you hold a complete snapshot of your business. Access itself, or anything that reads Access files, can export every table to CSV. Later and larger E2 installs run on SQL Server instead, where standard SQL tools do the job. E2's reports are Crystal Reports underneath, so any report exports to Excel as a fallback.

Since the ECI acquisition, E2 has been folded into the cloud product JobBOSS² — which means on-prem E2 is legacy. If you're still on it, your data is fully in your hands today; that's worth acting on while it's true.

JobBOSS® (classic) and JobBOSS²

Classic JobBOSS is the friendly case: it runs on SQL Server, in your building. Whoever admins the server can export any table to CSV with Microsoft's free tools, and ECI publishes an official data dictionary for the database on its customer portal — get it downloaded now.

JobBOSS² is cloud — you cannot touch the database. What you have: grid and report exports from inside the app, and a public API for programmatic extraction. For a full migration extract, ask the vendor directly what they'll provide at offboarding, and get the answer in writing before you need it.

Made2Manage®

Another SQL Server system, with a tidy structure: one database per company (M2MData01, M2MData02…) plus a system database that — usefully — contains a built-in data dictionary cataloguing the tables and fields. The table names show the system's FoxPro ancestry (SOMAST for sales orders, JOMAST for jobs, INMAST for items), but they're all reachable with standard SQL tools. One quirk for whoever does the extract: INMAST is nowadays a view over a renamed physical table, which matters for some tooling but not for reading data out.

Global Shop Solutions®

The hard one of the group, honestly. Global Shop doesn't run on SQL Server — it runs on Actian Zen (formerly Pervasive, Btrieve underneath), a database most IT generalists have never touched. Extraction is still routine if two things are true: the Zen ODBC driver is available, and the install's DDF files (the data dictionary that tells ODBC what the tables look like) are present and current — without DDFs, ODBC access is impossible, full stop. Check for both before planning anything. Crystal-based reports export to Excel as the fallback, and the schema itself is queryable through Zen's system tables once ODBC works. One warning from the field: the same logical field can carry different names in different tables here, so budget verification time.

Fulcrum®

Pure cloud, so the database is out of reach — but the export story is decent: most grids in the system have an Export button (Excel, with filters applied, capped at 10,000 rows per export — chunk big history by date range), and there's a documented public API covering customers, vendors, items, jobs, quotes, orders, invoices, inventory, and routings, which is the self-serve route to a complete extract. The API documentation doubles as the closest thing to a table layout a cloud system has.

The scorecard

• Easiest: JobBOSS classic and Made2Manage — plain SQL Server plus a published data dictionary.
• Easy if old: E2 on Access — one file is your whole company.
• Doable with care: Global Shop — hinges entirely on the ODBC driver and DDFs.
• Different rules: JobBOSS² and Fulcrum — cloud systems where exports and APIs are the only doors, so test them before your renewal date is leverage.

Whichever you run, the finish line is the same: verify the conversion — record counts, then tie out open order value, A/R, A/P, and open POs against your old reports.

E2®, JobBOSS®, Made2Manage®, Global Shop Solutions®, and Fulcrum® are registered trademarks of their respective owners. Their use here is for identification only and implies no affiliation or endorsement.