How to switch studio software mid-year

Switch in a term break, not during a term

The natural moment is the gap between terms, when no classes are running and no fees are mid-collection. You have two weeks where the timetable is settled, nothing is being invoiced, and a mistake costs you nothing.

Switching in week four means running two systems while parents are paying into one of them. Avoid it if you possibly can.

Get your data out first — before you commit

Export from your current system before you sign anything new, because that's when you find out what you can actually take with you. You want students, families and contact details, current enrolments, the class timetable, and the fee history for the current financial year.

If the export is a PDF rather than a spreadsheet, that's worth knowing early. It doesn't necessarily stop you moving, but it changes how long it takes.

• Students, with dates of birth and any medical notes
• Families, with the contact details you actually use
• Who is currently enrolled in what
• The class timetable, including teachers and rooms
• Invoice and payment history for the current financial year
• Anything you're legally required to retain, such as signed consents

Leave the accounting history where it is

You don't need to migrate years of financial records into the new system. Your accounts live in your accounting software, and that's where the historical record should stay.

Bring across what's outstanding and what's needed for the current year. Trying to reconstruct three years of invoices in a new system is a large amount of work that helps nobody.

Run one term in parallel, deliberately

Keep read-only access to the old system for a term. Not to keep using it, but so that when a question comes up about what a family paid in April you can answer it without a panic.

Set a date for turning it off and tell yourself that's the date. Parallel running that has no end turns into paying for two systems indefinitely.

Tell families once, plainly

Families need to know three things: that the enrolment or payment link is changing, when, and what to do if something looks wrong. They don't need to know why you switched.

Send it once before the change and once when it goes live. The most common failure is a family paying into a system you've stopped watching, so make the new payment path unambiguous.

How this works in Olune

Students, families and classes can be brought in rather than retyped, so switching between terms doesn't mean rebuilding your roll by hand. Your data stays exportable — you can take students, families, invoices and site content out at any time, which is the same thing you should be asking of any system before you move onto it.