Switching care platforms without losing a fortnight

Most providers don’t run one system — they run a rostering app, a shared drive full of client folders, an accounting package and an HR tool, with a spreadsheet or two gluing them together. Before you look at any new platform, write down the four estates your data actually lives in:

• People — staff records, contracts, certificates and check expiries, availability and leave.
• Clients — profiles and contacts, support plans, goals, progress notes, and the documents attached to each person.
• Roster history — who worked what, timesheets, and the open or future shifts already promised to clients.
• Billing — your service and price book, funding agreements and budgets, and anything not yet invoiced or claimed.

Naming the estates turns “we’ll move everything” into a real checklist — and it’s the same checklist a good migration is run against.

The worst time to discover you can’t get your data out is the day after you cancel. While your current tools are live, pull:

• Clients and contacts as CSV, with funding type and status.
• The document library — client files, policies, staff certificates — kept in its folder structure so nothing loses its context.
• Your services and rates, including the NDIS item numbers you bill against.
• The staff list with certificate types and expiry dates.
• Open and future shifts, so nothing promised to a client falls through the switch.

Keep the exports dated and read-only. It’s your data — a platform worth moving to will help you get all of it out of the old one, and let you get it back out of the new one whenever you ask.

Migration is a chance to fix the mess, not carry it across. In Corella the target shape is deliberately simple: one record per client, role-scoped so the office sees everything and field staff see only the need-to-know for the person in front of them. Documents arrive with their expiry dates and version codes intact, so “which policy is current” has one answer. Your price book lands with per-band NDIS item numbers and the current price caps, ready to invoice against — not a list of rates someone has to re-check by hand.

The point of moving into one client recordis that the Tuesday program and the Thursday home visit finally tell one story — and the story doesn’t depend on which tab you happen to have open.

Data migration is part of onboarding, done with you rather than handed to your admin team as a second job. Records are brought across and checked against the source — client by client, document by document — so you go live trusting what you see. For one provider we migrated 149 clients and over 3,000 documents into their own instance in a day, verified record by record. It can be done properly and quickly; the two aren’t opposites.

For our first five providers, that full migration is included with the founding-provider rate — the point being that the cost of moving should never be the reason a small provider stays stuck on tools that don’t fit.

Don’t big-bang it. The calm way to switch:

• Run in parallel for a pay cycle — new rosters go into Corella, the old tool stays readable.
• Cut the roster over once a full week rosters cleanly, with conflicts and clock-on behaving as expected.
• Prove the money — do one real invoice run, generate one NDIA bulk claim file, and export one payroll CSV before you rely on them.
• Then switch off the old subscriptions — not before the exports are safely stored and the first cycle has cleared.

A fortnight of overlap costs a little in double subscriptions and saves you the nightmare scenario: a claim or a pay run that can’t be reconstructed because the old system went dark too soon.