Your data-export checklist before you switch

Before you import anything into a new platform, you have to get your data out of the old one — completely, and in a form you can use. This is the step clubs rush and regret, because access to the old system often vanishes the moment the subscription lapses. Treat the export as its own project with its own checklist. Here's exactly what to pull, in what format, and how to verify it.

Export before you cancel — not after

The single most expensive mistake is canceling the old subscription to save a month's fee, then discovering your data is locked behind a paywall you no longer pay. Do every export while your account is fully active. Only after you've pulled everything, verified it, and imported it into the new platform do you downgrade or cancel. The overlap month is cheap insurance.

The four things to pull

Your club's data falls into four buckets. Get all four:

1. Family contacts. Guardian names, emails, phone numbers, mailing addresses, and the household relationships — which kids belong to which family. This is the foundation everything else attaches to, so it's the most important export and the one to verify hardest.
2. Rosters and athletes. Every athlete, their date of birth, team or division assignment, jersey number, and the family they link to. If your old tool stores positions or sizes, pull those too.
3. Payment history. Who paid what and when, outstanding balances, active installment plans, and refunds or credits issued. Your treasurer needs an accurate starting balance so the new system doesn't double-charge or lose anyone. If you want the deeper picture of how plans and credits should carry over, see refunds and credits.
4. Signed documents. Waivers, consent forms, medical notes, and any compliance records. These are your legal record. A waiver you can't produce is a waiver you don't have, so download the actual signed files, not just a "signed: yes" checkbox.

Demand open formats

How the data comes out matters as much as what comes out. Insist on formats you can open and re-import anywhere:

• CSV for anything in rows — contacts, rosters, payment history. A CSV opens in any spreadsheet and imports into any modern platform.
• PDF for documents that need to stay as they were signed — waivers, consent forms.

What you do not accept is a vendor's proprietary backup blob you can only restore into their own product, a series of screenshots, or "we'll email you a summary." If the only way to get your data is a format that only the old vendor can read, that's a lock-in tell — and a reason you're switching in the first place. A platform confident in its value, like the one behind our published pricing, treats your data as yours to take.

Verify before you trust it

An export is not done because a file downloaded. Open it and spot-check against the live system before the old account closes:

• Pick a dozen families at random and confirm their contacts and kids match the live record exactly.
• Check the row counts — does the contacts file have roughly the number of families you actually have?
• Confirm payment totals reconcile with what your treasurer expects.
• Open a few of the signed-document PDFs and make sure they're the real signed files, not blank templates.

Catch the gaps now, while you can still re-export, instead of three months later when the old account is gone.

Owning your data is the point

The whole reason this checklist exists is a principle worth stating plainly: your club's family and financial records belong to your club, not to whatever software happens to hold them this season. A platform that makes export easy is telling you it earns your business by being good, not by trapping your data. That's the same posture as publishing the price — confidence instead of capture.

How this connects to consolidation: getting clean exports out of a five-tool stack means running this checklist five times, against five vendors, hoping the formats line up. Onto a single consolidated platform, your families, rosters, payments and documents already live together — so the day you'd ever want to leave again, the export is one clean pull, not five. Owning your data and consolidating onto one login are the same instinct: keep your records portable, and keep your season simple.