Stuck on software you have outgrown
You started on a general salon booking app. It was fine when it was you and one room. Now you have three practitioners, injectables, lasers and a membership scheme, and you want an aesthetics clinic system such as Pabau or Consentz. The new system looks right. What stops you is the move.
Your old system holds years of client records, before and after photos attached to appointments, signed consent PDFs, notes about products used. The export button gives you a spreadsheet of names and appointment dates. The photos and consents are not in it.
Why aesthetics migrations are harder
A salon moving systems needs clients and appointments. An aesthetics clinic needs a clinical-style history that can be relied on later, and much of it is in formats standard exports ignore.
- Photos attached to appointments, often in large numbers.
- Signed consent forms stored as documents per treatment.
- Product and batch details in notes or custom fields.
- Memberships, courses and vouchers with balances still owed.
- Marketing consent recorded in different ways over the years.
What a poor migration costs
| Risk | Consequence |
|---|---|
| Photos left behind | No before images for review or complaint handling |
| Consents not moved | Signed forms you cannot find when asked |
| Balances lost | Course sessions and voucher value owed to clients but not recorded |
| Consent to marketing lost | Starting again, or contacting people wrongly |
| Old system cancelled too soon | No way back to check what was there |
Most clinics only find out what an export missed when a client asks about a treatment from two years ago. By then the old subscription has usually ended.
Balances are the sneakiest part. A client who bought a course of six before the switch and has used two will expect four more. If the new system shows none, reception is left sorting it out with a client who, reasonably, does not want to hear about software.
How we run the migration
- Inventory: what the old system holds, what it can export, and what can only be reached through its API or a manual route.
- Mapping: every field, document and photo to its place in the new system, agreed with you, including what will not move and why.
- Trial run: a sample of clients, including awkward ones, moved first and checked by you in the new system.
- Full move in stages: clients and appointments, then notes, then photos and documents, then balances for courses, memberships and vouchers.
- Verification against the source system, not just the export: counts reconciled, photos and consents spot-checked, balances confirmed.
- The old data kept readable, either by keeping the old account on a read-only plan or by producing a searchable archive, for as long as you need.
Some systems make getting data out genuinely hard. We say what is realistic before you commit, and if a manual step is unavoidable, we plan it rather than discovering it late.
After the switch
Your team starts on the new system with each client's history, photos and signed consents in place. Course balances and vouchers are right on day one. If something from years ago is needed, it is either in the new system or in an archive you can search.
You finally get the features you moved for, without a nagging sense of what was left behind.
Staff training also goes more smoothly when the data is already there. Practitioners learn the new system using their own clients' real records, which makes it far easier to get comfortable with than a demo account with invented names.
Signs worth acting on
- You have outgrown your booking software but fear the move.
- Photos and consent forms are stored inside your current system.
- Your current system's export does not include documents.
- You have course, membership or voucher balances to carry over.
- You are unsure what the old system actually holds.