Switching Childcare Software? Keep Your Waitlist

It’s the second week of January. The new system went live over winter break, and it went better than you feared. Attendance works. Invoices went out on time. Then a dad calls about the infant spot his family has been waiting on since spring, and you can’t find them. Not on the waitlist screen, not in the archive, not anywhere.

You find them eventually, in a spreadsheet you exported “just in case” back in November, and add them back. But that file never had their application date, so on screen they look like they joined last week, behind families who applied months after them.

That’s the risk this post is about. Billing and attendance get all the attention in a software switch, and they should. The waitlist is the part that’s easy to skip until a family calls.

Why the waitlist is the easiest thing to lose

A software switch is organized around the children you bill: rosters, tuition rates, invoices, attendance, staff. If any of those come across wrong, someone notices on day one. A parent gets the wrong invoice. A teacher can’t check a child in.

Families on your waitlist don’t show up on any of those screens. They don’t get invoices and they aren’t checked in. If they don’t make the trip, nothing breaks. You find out months later, when a spot opens and the list you call from is shorter than the one you had.

You can see it in the vendors’ own checklists. The migration checklist Neztio publishes tells you to export your children, families, billing and attendance before you switch. It’s a good list. The waitlist isn’t on it.

And a waitlist is more than names. Its value is the order and the history: who applied first, who was promised a sibling spot, who wants three days instead of five, who said “call us after the baby comes.” A file that keeps the names but loses the dates and notes keeps the list and loses the line.

What to export before the old system shuts off

Do this yourself, even if the new vendor says they’ll bring everything over. It’s a short job, and it’s your only copy if something goes wrong. Make sure the file has:

• Every waiting family, including babies who aren’t born yet. If you take families by due date, check that they’re in the file.
• The date each family applied. That date is their place in line. Without it, a new system may stamp everyone with the day of the import, and the order is gone.
• Desired start date and age group or room. That’s what tells you which opening each family fits.
• Schedule. Full-time or part-time, and which days.
• Priority flags. Siblings, staff children, returning families, anyone you’ve promised something to.
• Notes. Especially the promises, like “told them we’d call in March.”
• Last contact. When you last heard from each family, so you know who has gone quiet.
• Tour dates and notes, if you keep them.

Save it as a spreadsheet, put today’s date in the file name, and keep it somewhere that belongs to neither system, like a shared drive.

If you’ve been meaning to clean up the list, do it now, before you move it, not after. Our guide to cleaning up a stale daycare waitlist walks through it, and the free waitlist health score gives you a quick read on how much cleanup you’re facing.

Questions to ask the new vendor before you sign

Your new system may well have a waitlist of its own: Procare’s home page lists waitlist and lead management, and Brightwheel’s says you can manage admissions and your waitlist online. So the question usually isn’t whether the new system has a waitlist. It’s whether yours arrives intact. Ask:

1. Will my waiting families come over during onboarding, or only enrolled children?
2. Will each family keep the date they applied, or get the date of the import? This is the one that decides whether your line survives.
3. Where do my notes and priority flags go? If there’s no field for them, they may not come across at all.
4. Can I export the waitlist again later, with those dates? Know the way out before you go in.
5. Will anything change for families? If they reply to emails or check their status through a link, find out whether old links stop working, and when.

Bloomily’s guide to switching software makes the same point about history in general: ask specifically what the new platform can import before you commit. Get the answers in an email, not just on a sales call.

When to switch, and when not to

Pick a quiet stretch. Neztio’s checklist suggests winter break, spring break, or a slow part of summer, and says to avoid August and September, when back-to-school enrollment peaks. Bloomily’s guide says the same thing another way: switch after a major enrollment period ends, not in the middle of one.

For the waitlist, add two rules of your own:

• Don’t switch with offers open. If a family has an offer and a reply-by date, settle it in the old system or write it down before you go. An offer that lives in a system you’ve turned off is an offer nobody follows up on.
• Settle the list before your busiest calling weeks. If you expect spots to open in January, have the waitlist checked and working in its new home by early December, so your first round of calls comes from a list you trust.

Check the move: count, then spot-check

The day the import finishes, do two things.

First, count. Count the waiting families in your export and in the new system, by age group if you can. The numbers should match. If they don’t, find out why before you delete anything.

Second, check the front of every line. Look at the first five families in each age group and compare them with your export: same order, same application date, same notes. The front of the line is who you’ll call next, so that’s where a mistake costs you.

Neztio suggests running the old and new systems side by side for two to three days to make sure attendance, billing and messaging work. For the waitlist, your export file is the backup. Keep it until your first round of offers from the new system has gone out.

The step-by-step for matching columns and checking an import is in our waitlist migration guide. It was written for moving off a spreadsheet, but the import part works the same way.

What to tell families

Usually, very little. What a waiting family wants to know is that you still have them. If nothing changes on their end, you don’t need to announce a switch.

If something does change, like a new link or a new address your emails come from, send one short note, and send it after you’ve checked the move, so it’s true: “We’ve moved our waitlist to a new system. You’re still on our list, and nothing about your application has changed. From now on, our emails will come from [new address].”

Does your waitlist have to move at all?

Here’s a question worth asking before you move anything: does the waitlist have to live in the same system as billing?

It can. If the new system’s waitlist does what you need, keeping everything in one place is simpler, and that’s a fine choice. The other option is to keep the waitlist in a tool of its own, one that doesn’t move when your billing software does. Then a future switch doesn’t touch your list at all.

That’s how Seedlist is built. It’s waitlist and enrollment software for childcare centers, and it doesn’t do tuition billing or attendance, so it sits next to whatever does. It imports a .csv or .xlsx file. If your file has the date each family applied, Seedlist keeps that date; if it doesn’t, it keeps your families in the order they appear in the file. And you can download your whole list as a spreadsheet anytime, with application dates, desired start dates and priority included, so your list is never stuck anywhere.

If you’re on Procare, our Seedlist vs. Procare comparison lays out what each one does well. Seedlist is $59 a month flat, and you can start a 30-day free trial with no credit card.