01
Ask before you need it
Request an export while the relationship is normal, not the week you give notice. A routine request from an active customer gets a routine answer. The same request after a cancellation can wait in a queue. Some clubs make it an annual habit: one export every January, kept in the club’s own storage.
Check the contract and the DPA for the export clause before asking. Most say the club can have its data, and quoting the clause in the request tends to shorten the wait.
02
The questions to send, in writing
Send the request as a short list of questions rather than a single sentence. Vague requests get a spreadsheet with names and nothing else.
- What format is the export: a spreadsheet, a comma-separated file, or a document?
- Which fields are included for each member, and is email included in full?
- Are future bookings included, with court, date, time, and paid status?
- Are recurring bookings exported as rules or as individual dates?
- Are class rosters, memberships, and credit balances included?
- How long does the export take, and is there a charge for it?
- Can the club run it again itself, or is each one a support request?
03
Check the file against reality
When the file arrives, open it and count. Compare the number of members against the club’s own sense of the roll. Sort by email and look for blanks. Sort by last booking date and see whether the history goes back as far as expected. Look for masked values, such as emails replaced with an ID, which make the file useless for contacting anyone.
Then pick 10 members at random and check each row against what staff know. 10 rows take 15 minutes and catch most systematic problems: a plan column that is always empty, phone numbers with the dialling code stripped, dates in a format that will break on import.
- Member count against the club’s expectation
- Email present and unmasked in every row
- Membership plan and status filled in
- Dates in one consistent format
- 10 random rows checked by hand
04
Future bookings and balances are part of the list
A member list without future bookings is half an export. The bookings for the next 8 weeks are what let a new system open with a full calendar instead of an empty one. Ask for them separately if they are not in the first file, and ask for credits, passes, and prepaid balances too, because those are money the club owes its members and must carry over.
05
When the answer is slow or the file is thin
If the export takes weeks or arrives thin, escalate in writing, quoting the contract clause and the DPA. Set a date. In parallel, have staff use the old tool while it is still readable to fill the gaps: screenshots of the next month’s schedule, a manual list of active members from the admin screen. It is slow, but it is the club’s data either way, and a partial file plus a week of desk work is still a complete migration.
06
What to do with it once you have it
Store the file somewhere the club controls, with a date in the filename. Then import it into the new system during the free preview and read the import report. A good import shows which rows it took and which it skipped, and why. Skipped rows are where the export was thin, and they are the list of records staff finish by hand before launch.