Importing students from your old system

Most schools land on Rosterra with a CSV from their previous software. The import tool handles the common cases without manual cleanup.

What you can import

• Students (name, birthday, starting rank, household)
• Guardians (name, email, phone, household link)
• Existing memberships (program, monthly rate, start date, status)

Payments and attendance history are intentionally not imported. They stay in your old system as a historical record. Rosterra starts fresh from the day you switch over.

Preparing your CSV

1. Export your students from your previous system. A wide CSV with one row per student and guardian columns works best.
2. Open it in Excel or Google Sheets and check that:

• Birthdays use the same format throughout (MM/DD/YYYY or YYYY-MM-DD).
• Guardian emails are not blank for active students.
• Rank names match the ladder you set up at /settings/ranks.

1. Save as CSV (not XLSX).

Running the import

Go to /memberships/import and upload the file. Rosterra previews the first few rows and asks you to map your columns to its fields. Mappings are saved, so if you import a second batch later, the same mapping is offered.

The import runs in the background. You will see a progress bar, and an email goes out when it finishes. Any rows that could not be parsed are listed at the end with the reason, so you can fix and re-import just the failures.

What happens to billing

Imported memberships are created in pending status. They do not start charging until you click Activate on each one, or use bulk-activate from the membership list. This protects you from accidentally double-charging families that are still on their old subscriptions for the month.

If you charge new families on the 1st, a clean cutover is: import in the last week of the month, activate everyone in bulk on the 1st, and cancel the old system's autobill that same day.