Leaving ShiftCare: the data you must get out, and the order to do it in

Before you touch anything, find out two dates: when your ShiftCare contract actually ends, and when you lose access to historical data as opposed to simply losing the ability to add new records. Those are not the same date, and the gap between them is where migrations go wrong. Some platforms lock exports the day billing stops; others leave read-only access for a grace period.

Get it from ShiftCare support in writing rather than inferring it from a help article, because it is the one fact your whole timeline hangs off. Then build the plan backwards from that date with at least two weeks of buffer, so there is room to re-export anything that looks wrong the first time. There almost always is something.

Work through these roughly in order. Later exports — notes, documents — reference the client and staff identifiers you pull first, so doing it the other way round means stitching records together by name, which is where duplicates are born.

• 1. Client records. Names, contact details, NDIS numbers, plan dates, emergency contacts, preferences, and any custom fields your team has added over the years. Take the CSV, but also take a PDF or screen capture of a handful of complete client profiles — exports frequently flatten or drop fields that live behind an expandable section in the interface, and a full-profile snapshot is how you find out which.
• 2. Staff records. Contact details, qualifications and their expiry dates, training completions, timesheet and pay history. If the platform has been your system of record for leave balances or award-based pay, export that too — it is your evidence if a pay question surfaces a year later.
• 3. Shift history. Every shift ever rostered, not just the roster ahead: date, time, staff assigned, client, service type and status — completed, cancelled, no-show. This is the evidence behind past billing and behind any funding-body query about whether a service was delivered. Take the full history if you can get it, and twelve months at the absolute minimum.
• 4. Progress notes and case notes. The highest-risk item on this list. Export the full text of every note with its author, timestamp and the client it belongs to. If your notes carry categories or tags, confirm those come across — a flat export of note bodies with the category column missing is a common and quiet failure.
• 5. Documents. Support plans, risk assessments, service agreements, signed consent forms, incident reports — anything held as an attached file. If there is no bulk download, download them individually, and check the filenames survived. A folder of document_1.pdf, document_2.pdf with the client context stripped out is a real outcome and a painful one.
• 6. Price book and billing history. Your NDIS line items, unit prices and anything custom you built. Separately, export invoice and payment history — not just what is currently owed, but a ledger of everything issued and paid, in case a funder or auditor asks about last financial year.

None of this is specific to ShiftCare. These are the parts of a care record that resist being flattened into files, and they behave the same way leaving almost any platform — including, to be fair, ours. Expect trouble here and plan for it.

• The relationships between records. A file of notes and a file of clients are easy. A reliable link between them — this note belongs to this client, written by this staff member, during this shift — is the part that breaks. Check whether the exports use consistent identifiers across files before you assume you can reassemble them.
• Permission and privacy flags. If some notes were office-only or restricted to particular roles, that flag rarely travels. Once it is a spreadsheet it is flat data, and someone has to decide again what is sensitive.
• The audit trail. Who changed what, and when, is usually the first casualty of a standard export. If you need it for compliance, ask specifically whether an audit-log export exists and in what format — don't assume it's inside the other files.
• Custom forms, fields and templates. Anything you built yourself is unlikely to have a clean export format. Capture them on screen before access ends, so that even if the structure doesn't move, the knowledge of what existed does.
• Attachments inside notes. A photo embedded in a case note does not always travel with a text export of that note. Assume photos need their own pass until you've proven otherwise.

A completed export is not the same as a correct one, and the difference only shows up once the old system is gone. Before you cancel anything:

• Check a sample properly rather than everything badly. Pick five clients — a mix of long-standing and recently onboarded — and compare every field on the live profile against the export, line by line.
• Count first, compare second. If the platform lists a given number of active clients, the export should have exactly that many rows. If it is short by two, find those two before you go any further. It is never a rounding issue.
• Check notes for completeness, not just presence. Open a long note in both places and compare the full text. Some exports truncate at a character limit or strip line breaks, and a note that reads as one wall of text has lost meaning even though nothing is technically missing.
• Verify what you need soonest, first. A service agreement due for renewal next month matters more today than one from three years ago. Prioritise accordingly rather than working chronologically.
• Keep the old account read-only for one full billing cycle. If something is missing, you want to be able to go back and fetch it — not reconstruct it from memory and a spreadsheet.

Corella runs the same workflow these exports come from — client records, progress notes, documents, price book, rostering, billing and payroll — in a single instance that belongs to one provider, hosted in Sydney.

There is no one-click migration tool here, and you should be sceptical of anyone who claims one. Moving providers means doing the export-and-verify work above, and that is true whichever platform you are leaving and whichever one you are joining. What we do is take that work on with you rather than handing it to your admin team: we map clients, staff, documents and history into your instance and check it with you, record by record, as part of onboarding.

If it helps to see the two products side by side first, the full Corella and ShiftCare comparison is dated and sourced, and it is honest about the several places ShiftCare is ahead of us — integrations, direct PRODA claiming, recurring invoices and outbound messaging among them.