Importing your existing clients, pets and history

There is no import button, and you do not need one. Migrations are done for you as part of onboarding. You send us an export from your current system, we load it, and you check the result before going live.

This is deliberate. Client and pet records arrive tangled together — one household with three pets, two phone numbers and a decade of appointments — and a self-service uploader makes a mess of exactly that.

What to send

Ask your current provider for a full data export or backup, not a report and not a spreadsheet you assembled yourself. A full export keeps the links between a client, their pets and their bookings; a spreadsheet of names and numbers throws those away and cannot be rebuilt afterwards.

Two things worth knowing before you ask:

Some providers take several days to produce a backup. Request it early — this is usually the longest step.
Ask for the export in whatever format they offer natively. We would rather do the conversion than have you attempt one.

Send it to us with your business name and we will confirm what we can see in it.

What transfers

Clients — names, phone numbers, email addresses, addresses.
Pets — names, species, breed, and their link to the right owner.
Appointment history — past and upcoming bookings, with dates, times and the service.
Services — your service list and prices.
Notes — client and pet notes.

What does not transfer

Be prepared for these. None of them is a fault, and each is quick to set up fresh:

Photos and documents. Pet photos, signed agreements and vaccination certificates stay in the old system. Download anything you need to keep before you close that account.
Financial history. Past invoices, payments and account balances do not come across. Your accounts for previous years stay with your old provider or your accountant — Alaga's reporting starts from the day you go live.
Staff logins. Team members are invited fresh, which is a good moment to review who still needs access.
Settings. Hours, pricing rules, deposit policies, boarding capacity and message templates are all configured in Alaga rather than imported.
Card details. Stored payment methods can never be exported from one provider to another. Clients re-enter a card the first time they pay you through Alaga.

Checking the result

When the load is done, do not assume it worked — spend twenty minutes on this:

Count the clients. Compare the total in Clients against the total in your old system. A large gap means something did not parse.
Spot-check five clients you know well. Right pets, right phone number, right spelling.
Check a household with several pets. This is where imports most often go wrong — pets attached to the wrong owner, or a second record created for the same person.
Check your busiest upcoming week in the calendar against the old system, appointment by appointment.
Look at your service list and prices. Prices are the thing you will notice last and regret most.

Tell us about anything wrong while the migration is fresh. Fixing a bad import is far easier before you have started booking on top of it.

Running both systems at once

Keep your old system open, read-only, for a few weeks. It costs little and it is the only way to answer "what did we charge them last March" during the changeover.

Pick a cut-over date and stop taking bookings in the old system on that date. Do not book in both — appointments made in the old system after the export was taken will not be in Alaga, and that is how a customer arrives to find nobody expecting them.

Duplicates after an import

If clients also sign themselves up through your booking page, you can end up with two records for one person. That is normal and fixable — see Fixing duplicate clients and pets. Scanning the client list for near-identical rows straight after the import is the cheapest time to catch them.