From Excel and registers to Inkwelly. The easiest move we do.

Send us the messy sheets

Schools often want to tidy their spreadsheets before handing them over. Don't — send them as they are. Cleaning is a stage of the process and we're better equipped for it than an office doing it in the evenings, and a tidied sheet often loses the very inconsistencies that tell us what happened.

Multiple files, different formats per class, three versions of the fee sheet with different dates in the filename: all normal, all expected.

Records that exist only on paper

Admission registers, attendance registers and fee ledgers that were never in a spreadsheet can still come across. We work from photographs of the pages — a phone camera is fine.

It's slower than reading a spreadsheet, and it's a one-time effort that means the switch doesn't start your records from zero. Most schools bring across the current year and the two before it, and leave the older registers on the shelf.

What reliably needs cleaning

• The same student appearing on two class sheets after a mid-year move.
• Names spelled differently between the fee sheet and the marks sheet, which is what makes the two hard to join.
• Fee columns whose meaning changed partway down the sheet.
• Phone numbers stored as text in some rows and numbers in others, dropping leading zeros.
• Siblings sharing a parent contact recorded slightly differently on each child.

How the move actually runs

Extraction first. We take everything we can get — students, parents, fee ledgers, marks, attendance, staff records, transport routes — through whatever route works, and that's our job rather than yours.

Then cleaning, which is the part that takes the time. Duplicate siblings entered twice, phone numbers that stopped working two years ago, students sitting in a class they left last April, fee heads that mean different things in different years. We do the work and come back to your office with a short list of judgement calls only they can make.

Then staging. The cleaned data goes into a school you can log into and check — real screens, your students, your numbers — before anything is live. You approve it, or you send it back.

Then you pick a date. Go-live can be the next working day. You pick the date; we don't need months of parallel running to get there.

What happens to your history

Everything current comes across before go-live: enrolled students, their parents and contacts, outstanding balances, this year's marks and attendance, staff records.

Historical depth — old fee ledgers, marks from previous years, archived certificates, alumni records — is brought across on its own track afterwards. It doesn't hold up day one, and separating the two is why go-live can be quick without anything being lost.

Frequently asked