Help centre
Moving from Cliniko, Zanda or Pabau
How the CSV import maps your columns, catches duplicates before it writes anything, and lets you run a parallel week before you switch.
Nobody changes practice management system because they enjoy it. The migration is the reason clinics stay somewhere they have outgrown, so this is the part Orla tries hardest to make dull.
Export from where you are, import here
Cliniko, Zanda and Pabau all export CSV. Orla reads that directly — there is no intermediate spreadsheet to hand-groom, and no "send us your file and we will get back to you in a fortnight".
Your columns are mapped for you, and you can correct it
Orla reads the header row and guesses which of your columns is the first name, the surname, the phone number, the date of birth and so on. Every system names these differently, so the guess is a starting point rather than an assumption: you see the mapping it chose and change anything it got wrong before anything is written.
Nothing is written until you have seen what will happen
The import runs as a dry run first. It parses your file, applies the mapping and produces a plan: how many patients will be created, how many match somebody already in Orla, and which rows it cannot use.
Duplicate detection is by phone number against the patients already in your clinic, so importing the same file twice does not give every patient a twin, and a second export taken a week later updates rather than duplicates.
Phone numbers are normalised to your country
A file full of 087 123 4567 and +353 87 123 4567 and 0035387 1234567 is
three formats for one person, and it is why duplicate detection fails in most
migrations. Orla normalises numbers to the dialling code of the clinic's own
timezone before comparing them — Ireland, the UK, and the other European
markets it launches into.
Medical record numbers
Patients arriving without one are assigned an MRN as they are created, so the clinic has a stable internal identifier from day one rather than after somebody notices it is missing.
Clinical notes are a separate, gated step
Patients and appointments can be imported by any staff member with the right role. Clinical notes cannot. Importing notes requires a clinical role, because notes are clinical records and the person moving them should be someone entitled to read them. The preview and the run are both gated this way.
The parallel week
Run both systems for a week before you switch. Book in both, and compare at the end of the week: the counts should agree, and where they do not you find out with a week of overlap in hand rather than on the Monday you cut over.
Nothing is re-keyed by hand, so the parallel week costs you the double booking-entry and nothing else.
What we do with you
For pilot clinics this is a guided setup rather than a link to a help page. We migrate the data with you, check the counts on both sides, train the team, and check in weekly afterwards.