Anyone considering switching to a new management system almost always has the same question in mind, and rarely says it first: "What happens to everything we have inside?" Years of records, registers, photos, receipts. The fear of losing historical data is the reason many facilities postpone the change year after year.
Let’s look at the issue honestly: what data is really worth bringing into the new system, what should be exported and archived, how to prepare a file for import, and how much work it entails.
Bringing Everything Is Not the Goal
The instinct is to transfer every single piece of information. But an entire archive moved over also carries its flaws: duplicates, children who left years ago still marked as active, contacts of families who no longer attend.
The useful criterion is not "What can I bring?" but "What do I need operational on Monday morning?" Everything else needs to be preserved, not imported. These are two different needs: the first is resolved with an orderly export archived, the second with a loading into the new management system.
The Data Worth Bringing In
The list of what is really needed actively is shorter than it seems:
- Records of enrolled children — name, date of birth, tax code, section, belonging school. It’s the foundation on which everything else rests.
- Family and contacts — parents, pickup authorizations, phone numbers, and emails. This is the data families notice immediately if it’s wrong, so it deserves the most care.
- Staff — educators, teachers, coordinators, kitchen staff, auxiliaries: needed to assign sections and start the registers.
- Enrollments for the upcoming year — who will attend from September, with assigned section and school.
- Open accounting positions — unpaid fees, deposits already paid, credit notes to be compensated. Leaving these items out means finding them as a discussion with families in November.
A technical clarification worth knowing beforehand: in Easy.School, bulk loading from XLSX or CSV files covers children, family members, and staff. Open accounting positions do not enter from there: they are reconstructed by assigning products and packages to each child's record. It’s manual work and should be accounted for in the work plan.
The Data That Is Exported and Archived
This is the part that scares the most and is actually resolved better. They do not need to enter the new system:
- Daily registers from closed years — attendance, meals, rests. They should be exported from the old system and kept as documents, not reloaded as live data.
- Photos and videos from past years — they are the heaviest material and the least consulted after the first year.
- Documents and contracts already signed — digital copies in the archive, organized by educational year, are sufficient.
- Records of children who left a long time ago — if they are not needed for certifications or reports, they remain in the export.
Obligation of preservation and obligation of import are not the same thing. An orderly PDF in a folder by year, with a backup copy, satisfies the first without burdening the second.
It’s worth noting something about space, because often it’s the reason why everything is dragged along "for safety": in Easy.School, the included space grows with the facility — 4 GB for the first 20 children and 0.2 GB for each additional child — so archiving is not a cost that kicks in as soon as the facility grows. And from the photo and video section, old content can be deleted in bulk, instead of cleaning them one by one. Finally, data exports are unlimited and included in the license: what goes in can always be taken out again.
How to Prepare the File for Import
The file is the part that determines success. A few rules, but they must be followed:
- One sheet per type of data: one for children, one for family members, one for staff. No mixed sheets.
- One row per person, headers on the first row, no empty rows in between, no merged cells, and no total rows at the bottom.
- Dates in a single format throughout the column. Dates written in three different ways are the most common cause of errors during checks.
- Child's tax code as a reference to link family members to the correct record.
- Fields that the old system had and the new one does not: check if they can become custom fields in the records of children, family members, and staff.
The flow is then linear: you upload the XLSX or CSV file, do the mapping of the columns indicating which field corresponds to each, check the preview, the system performs validation and highlights the rows that do not match. If the result is not convincing, the operation can be canceled. It’s the coordinator who manages it, without going through support.
Practical advice: do the first run with ten or fifteen test rows. Correcting the layout on fifteen rows takes five minutes, on three hundred it’s another story.
The Work It Really Entails
Here clarity is needed. The lengthy part is not the loading, which takes a few minutes: it’s the hours beforehand. Deciding who is still enrolled and who is not. Standardizing section names. Recovering missing tax codes. Choosing which contacts to keep. Reconciling open fees.
For a facility with sixty or eighty enrolled children, it generally takes two or three half days of someone who knows the data — usually the coordinator, because they are the only one who can distinguish a still valid record from one to let go. It’s not an afternoon and it’s not automatic. Those who describe the migration as a one-click operation are oversimplifying quite a bit.
The trade-off is that it’s work done once, leaving behind a clean database: often it’s the first time in years that someone looks at that archive in its entirety.
Why Summer Is the Right Time
The timing is not a detail. In summer, the educational year is closed, so the registers have a clear endpoint and there is no data in motion while they are being moved. The facility is either still or at a reduced pace, and those preparing the files have a clear mind. New enrollments have not yet started, so there’s no risk of entering the same child twice in two systems.
Above all, in September, you restart with only one system. Keeping the old and the new in parallel once the year has started is the choice that causes the most failures: it doubles the work of educators right during the acclimatization weeks.
The pre-enrollments collected from the public form for the new year then enter directly into the new system, without double entry. And the annual enrollment retains the history of previous years, so the year you import now becomes the basis on which all subsequent ones rest. If you want to test the layout before preparing the final files, the 30-day free trial for up to 20 children serves exactly this purpose: to test a sample, not to migrate the entire facility. It’s the same gradual approach that is advisable to follow for digitizing a nursery in general.
What to Do with the Old Management System Afterwards
Do not close the contract on the same day of the switch. Before shutting down the old system, take the time to do things in order: export everything you can export, in open formats like PDF, Excel, or CSV; open a few sample files to verify that they are truly readable; save the archive in two different places, not just on the secretary's computer.
If the provider allows it, keep read-only access for a few months. Finally, write down somewhere who did the export, when, and what it contains. In three years, when a document from a closed year is needed, that note is worth more than any memory.
In Summary
Changing management systems does not mean bringing everything along: it means distinguishing the data that must remain operational — records, family members, staff, enrollments, and open accounting positions — from those that should be exported and archived, like the registers from closed years and old photos. Bulk loading from XLSX or CSV, with column mapping, preview, validation, and the ability to cancel, makes the transition controllable; however, preparing the files remains real work, worth doing in summer and only once.
Want to see how the import works before deciding? Try Easy.School for free.
