How to Switch Training Management System Without Losing Bookings

Switching from one training management system to another is three jobs: getting your data out in a shape the new system can read, deciding what happens to everything that is mid-flight on the switch date, and moving the outside world (booking links, payments, accounting) across. The import is often the shortest of the three. The contract sets the calendar: it fixes the last day you can give notice before the term renews, and how long your data stays available after you leave. Plan backwards from the renewal date, pick one switch date for new bookings, and let the bookings already in progress finish where they started.

Key takeaways

• Read the contract first. Terms run from a rolling month to three years, and some agreements keep your data for export for only a few weeks after you leave.
• Export twice: a working export shaped for the new system’s importers, and a full archive of everything for your records.
• Each system exports differently. Some list exports are capped at a few hundred records, Bookwhen’s CSV exports cover attendances, bookings and customers but not the events themselves, and Eventbrite shows “Info requested” where a buyer never named the attendees.
• Bookings in progress need a decision each: future dates move, part-paid plans finish where they started, unpaid invoices stay with the accounting system.
• On the switch date, new bookings go to the new system only. Booking links outside your website are the thing most often missed.

Start with the contract

The agreement sets the date you can leave. Three things in it matter: when the term ends, how much notice stops it renewing, and what happens to your data afterwards. This is what each vendor publishes. Your own order form or contract can differ, so check it as well.

System	Term	To leave	Your data afterwards
Arlo	Monthly or annual billing; renews automatically for a term of the same length	Notice on or before the date 30 days before the term ends	Available for export if you ask within 30 days of termination; after that it may be deleted
Administrate	Three-year terms, with a setup fee	Set in your contract	No public statement
accessplanit	Annual licence, payable monthly or quarterly	Set in your contract	No public statement
Dante	Rolling monthly contract, minimum length “zero months”	Cancel at any time at no cost	No public statement

Where the terms are not published, ask for three dates in writing before you start: the last day to give notice, the last day the account is live, and the last day you can export. Then count back. With a 30-day notice period and a term that ends on 31 March, notice has to be given on or before 1 March, and the new system should be running before the old one closes so that nothing is rushed.

What to export from each system

Export more than you think you need. The working export is what you import: contacts, organisations, courses, dates, registrations and orders, in that order of dependency. The archive is everything else (old reports, invoices, emails, certificate PDFs), kept as files in case a client asks next year who attended in 2024.

From	What you can export	Watch for
Arlo	Reports on courses, presenters, contacts and organisations, registrations, orders and leads, exported to Excel or PDF, plus simpler list exports	The export from the contacts or organisations page is capped at 200 records; use a report for larger sets. An advanced report holds up to 75 fields by default
accessplanit	Report Writer, API feeds (v1 and v2), and a Power BI integration	The Power BI integration is an additional, chargeable module, so check whether your package includes it before you rely on it
Administrate	Reporting Engine reports, exported for use outside Administrate, with events, delegates or invoices as the base	Exports are snapshots of the report when you run it, so run the final ones after the last booking on the old system. A delegates report has one row per registration, so an event appears once per learner
Bookwhen	CSV exports of attendances, bookings and customers; event information through the Bookwhen API	The CSV exports do not include the events themselves, so future dates come from the API or your own list. A transferred ticket’s updated value appears only in the attendances export
Eventbrite	Orders and attendee reports for one event or across events, as CSV or Excel	Orders where the buyer did not name the attendees show “Info requested” in place of a name and email
A spreadsheet	Each tab as a CSV	Covered step by step in moving from spreadsheets to a training management system

Two habits save time at import. Keep one folder per record type, named for what it is and the date you exported it. And check the row counts against the old system before you close it: if the old system says 1,840 contacts and the file has 200, you have hit an export cap.

What is mid-flight on the switch date

This is the part that decides whether learners and clients notice the move. On any given day a training provider has dates with bookings already taken, payment plans part-way through, invoices waiting to be paid and learners halfway through an online course. Each needs a decision before the switch date, and the decision is rarely “import everything”.

Past dates and past registrations move too, as history. They are what lets you answer a client who asks who they trained last year, and they are what certificate expiry dates hang from.

The switch month, step by step

The switch date matters more than the import date. Before it, new bookings go to the old system; after it, every new booking goes to the new one, with no week where both take bookings. Two systems taking bookings at once is how a learner ends up on two registers and a client receives two invoices.

Running both while the tail finishes

Running in parallel means the old system finishes what it started while the new one does everything new. That is a short list: payment plans that still have instalments to collect, online courses a learner is close to finishing, and reports for the period before the switch. Everything else (new dates, new bookings, reminders, certificates for dates after the switch) belongs to the new system from day one.

Ask the new provider to extend the trial over the migration. A standard trial can end before the first course on the new system has run, and a longer one means you are not paying for two systems while you check that everything came across.

For the quarter of the switch, the figures come from two places. Revenue and attendance are the old system’s report up to the switch date plus the new system’s report after it. Put both in the same spreadsheet once and note the date, so nobody adds them up twice.

What tends to break

Most of what goes wrong in a switch happens outside the training system. These are the common ones.

• Booking links you do not control. Emails already sent, your Google Business Profile, partner and awarding-body listings and social posts all point at the old checkout. List them before the switch date and update the ones you can.
• Course page addresses. If the course pages move, redirect the old addresses to the new ones, so search engines and bookmarks still arrive somewhere useful.
• Emails sent twice. With both systems’ automations on, a learner can get two reminders from two senders. Switch the old system’s reminders off on the switch date.
• The accounting connection. Two systems posting to Xero or QuickBooks at once produces duplicate invoices. Connect the new one from the switch date and disconnect the old one the same day.
• Trainer access. Freelance trainers need new logins and new calendar invites, and their old ones stop working when the account closes.
• Automations rebuilt from memory. Write down every automated email and rule in the old system before you leave (the trigger, the timing and the wording), then rebuild them in the new one in that order.

Frequently asked questions

How long does it take to switch training management system? It depends on three things you can find out before you start. The first is the notice period in the old contract, which ranges from none on a rolling monthly plan to the end of a multi-year term. The second is how long the new system’s setup takes (Cademy’s switching page plans five working days for a typical provider). The third is how long your in-progress bookings take to finish, which is set by your own payment plans and course lengths.

Can I move learners who are partway through a course? Their registrations move, and the record shows they were enrolled. Lesson-by-lesson progress rarely exports cleanly between systems (Cademy’s switching page says the same about imports into Cademy), so short courses are best finished in the old system and long ones moved with a note of where each learner had reached.

Will I lose my booking history? Only if you leave it behind. Import past dates and past registrations as well as future ones, and keep a full archive export as files. Check the archive opens before the old account closes.

Do I need to tell learners and clients? Tell clients who book by link or by invoice, because their links and invoice layout will change. Learners already booked on future dates need nothing more than the usual reminders, which now come from the new system.

What happens to saved card details and payment plans? Card details are normally held by the payment provider (Stripe, for example) rather than by the training system, and a payment schedule set up by one training system does not run in another. Let running plans finish in the old system, or close them and invoice the remainder from the new one, once.

When is the best time to switch? After your busiest booking period and before the renewal date, with enough room for the notice period. A month with fewer course dates gives the tail less to carry.

Where Cademy fits

Cademy has six importers, listed under Settings, Imports: courses, course dates (including blocks of dates), orders, registrations, contacts and organisations. Each takes a CSV or Excel file, and you map your old system’s columns to Cademy’s fields during the import. Booking imports send confirmation emails only if you map the Send Confirmation field, so learners already booked do not get a second confirmation by accident. Cademy’s team also runs a dedicated importer for Arlo: you export your courses, dates, contacts and bookings, and the team imports those files for you. Cademy’s pricing page puts contact imports on every plan, course imports from Pro, and migration support on Enterprise.

The switching page sets out the plan Cademy follows for a typical provider: five working days with one person on Cademy’s side, in five steps (kick-off and export, import and mapping into a staging account, website and payments, team and automations, first course live). Nothing on Cademy goes public until you switch it on, so the old system can carry on taking bookings until the switch date you choose, and Cademy’s team often extends the trial to cover the migration, so ask when you book the call. Leaving works the same way in reverse: contacts, organisations, registrations and orders each export from their lists, and Teams adds scheduled exports.

The switching page lists the five steps, and there are side-by-side pages for moving from Arlo, accessplanit, Administrate, Bookwhen and Eventbrite. If you are still choosing, the best training management software compared sets the seven systems side by side. To see what your export would look like on the other side, book a call with the file open, or start for free and import your contacts this week.

Sources

Checked 1 October 2026.

• Arlo: Master Subscription Agreement (sections 8.1 and 8.6, last updated 31 January 2022), Reports and exports overview, Find and export contacts and organisations, Reports FAQs, pricing
• Administrate: pricing FAQ, Reporting in Administrate
• accessplanit: pricing, Integrate your platform data with Power BI
• Dante: pricing and FAQ
• Bookwhen: Exporting data to CSV files, Bookwhen API
• Eventbrite: Download an Orders report, Download an Attendees report
• Cademy: Switching to Cademy, Import types, How to import bookings, pricing