The number one reason practices stay on software they complain about isn't price or features. It's fear of the move, years of client records, program history, authorizations, and claims living in a system that wasn't designed to let them leave. That fear is rational, but it's also manageable. Here's the playbook, applicable whichever platform you're moving to.
Not everything does, and knowing the difference cuts the project in half. Three categories: data you must migrate (active client demographics, insurance and authorizations with remaining units, current program and target definitions, staff records and credentials), data you must retain but not necessarily migrate (historical session notes, old claims, discharged-client records, these can live in a read-only export for your retention period), and data you can rebuild cheaper than you can move (schedule templates, form layouts, notification settings). Practices that try to migrate seven years of everything spend months on records nobody will open; practices that migrate the active book and archive the rest are live in weeks.
While you're still a customer in good standing, export everything your current vendor allows: client CSVs, authorization reports, claim histories, program data, document archives. Do this before announcing you're leaving, not because vendors sabotage departing customers, but because your motivation is highest now and support responsiveness never improves after you cancel. Check your contract for data-export clauses and deletion timelines; some platforms purge accounts quickly after termination.
After the import, before go-live, verify by sampling, pick ten clients and check them end to end. The four high-stakes items: authorization balances (remaining units must match to the unit, because over-delivering is unbillable and under-delivering is care not given), insurance details (a transposed member ID becomes a denial in week one), program and target definitions (mastery criteria and prompt hierarchies, not just names), and staff credentials with expiry dates (a lost expiry date is a compliance surprise later). Everything else, a mistyped phone number, a missing note, is annoying but recoverable.
Two to four weeks of overlap is right for most practices: long enough to run one full billing cycle in the new system while the old one still exists as reference, short enough that staff don't settle into double-entry as a lifestyle. Pick a clean cutover date, the start of a billing month, and make the old system read-only that day. The most common migration failure isn't lost data; it's a team half-living in each system for six months because nobody declared the switch finished.
Every ABAVault™ plan includes a self-serve import wizard built around exactly this playbook: upload your exports, map columns once, and the validator checks each row before anything can go live, with an error report you can actually fix. Today the wizard covers clients (with guardians) and authorizations, where balances are validated to the unit; insurance, program history, and staff credentials are next, so plan to spot-check those by hand for now. You review the result in a staging workspace, and re-running an import never creates duplicates. Practices that would rather delegate can hand the whole thing over, and we drive the same wizard on your data with your sign-off at every step. That is included at no cost for practices joining the beta. Either way your old platform stays untouched until you approve the cutover, and the schedule, typically two to four weeks, runs alongside normal operations.