Switching Daycare Management Software: Migration Checklist

Export before you cancel

Confirm the export format and the timeline for data deletion in writing before you give notice. A vendor's obligation to hold your data typically ends shortly after the contract does.

• Attendance history for the full retention period required by your state and any subsidy contract.
• Incident, injury, and medication records.
• Child and staff files, including immunization and clearance documentation.
• Invoices, payments, and year-end statements for the years your tax and business records must cover.
• Message and daily-report history if your policies or contracts treat it as a record.
• Verify each export opens outside the vendor's app — CSV, PDF, or ZIP that you can actually read on your own computer.

Reconcile the money

1. Produce an aging report of every open balance and credit on a fixed date.
2. Resolve disputes and write-offs in the old system, not the new one.
3. Confirm which payments are in flight — pending card settlements and scheduled charges must not run twice.
4. Cancel recurring charges in the old processor before enabling them in the new one.
5. Import opening balances as of the cutover date and re-run the aging report in the new system; the two totals must match.

Choose the cutover date

The safest cutover is the first day of a billing period that is not also the first week of a school year, a holiday week, or an inspection window. Give families two weeks of notice and staff two weeks of practice. If you must choose between a rushed clean cutover and a slower parallel run, choose the parallel run.

Communicating the switch

• Tell families once, clearly: what changes for them, the date, and what they need to do (usually: accept an invitation and re-add a payment method).
• Be explicit about payment methods — stored cards do not transfer between processors, and families must re-enter them.
• Give staff the two or three daily actions in the new system before family questions start.
• Keep a single help contact inside the center for the first month.

After the switch

• Keep the old system in read-only or downgraded status for at least one retention cycle if the cost is modest.
• Store the exports in two places, one of them offline or in separate cloud storage.
• Re-run one licensing-style records request against the new system: pick a random child and a random past date and try to produce the record.
• Review at 30 and 90 days for anything that quietly reverted to paper.