Moving From Jane: What Transfers Cleanly and What Does Not

Most of a Jane account moves across without difficulty, and the parts that do not are predictable once you know where the line sits. This is an honest account of both, written so you can plan a migration rather than discovering its limits halfway through one.

What comes across cleanly

Your client list, your practitioner and staff records, and your service or treatment catalogue all transfer as ordinary CSV files. Column names are matched for you, so the usual variations in how a spreadsheet names a field are handled rather than left for you to map by hand.

Keep the identifier column from your Jane export if it provides one. Keeping it makes re-importing the same file a safe operation, because the system recognises rows it has already seen instead of creating a second copy of every client.

What genuinely does not come across

Four categories have no importer, and it is worth being direct about why rather than leaving you to find out at the end.

Chart notes and clinical records are never imported automatically, by any path. Clinical free text belongs to a professional judgement about format and context, and no importer can make that judgement for you. Move them deliberately.

Appointment history and invoices have no import pipeline. They are frequently the largest part of an export, and they are the part most clinics end up keeping in the old system for reference rather than moving.

Intake form templates and submissions differ by clinic, and each one encodes how that clinic actually works. Rebuilding them is faster and more honest than importing a structure that was never designed for your practice.

Insurance policies and claims is the one people ask about most, and the reason is not that we cannot read a Jane policy row. It is that the row names an insurer whose plans, coverage percentages and coordination rules are not ours to guess. Importing one as though it were a live Canadian plan would produce claims that bill wrongly, which is a far worse outcome than re-entering them. Plan for a manual pass on this category.

The insurance point deserves a second look

When you already handle insurance billing, you will want to know exactly what happens with your policies and claims, because the answer is not "we haven't built it yet". Insurance policies, claims and receipts all work. What does not exist is an importer for them, and the gap is deliberate rather than a backlog item.

Plan the migration in the right order

Import your clients first. Practitioner and staff records are reconciled against the clients they treated, so they are queued to run after the client file rather than alongside it. Get that order wrong and the practitioner rows arrive with nothing to attach to.

Preview everything before you commit anything: previewing writes to a staging area and touches no real record, so you can look at what a file will do without having done it.

Anything ambiguous is deliberately left for a person to decide. A row that looks like an existing client is proposed as a match with a confidence level, and the ambiguous ones are never merged on their own. Existing data is never overwritten by an import, and a blank field is never filled with a guess.

If it goes wrong

Every import can be rolled back, and the rollback undoes only what that particular import did. Created records are removed unless something has happened to them since, in which case the tool declines and tells you which rows it left for you to handle. You are not left reverse-engineering a mess.

A week of planning is worth it

Export from Jane early, even if you are not switching for months. Looking at what is actually in each file tells you which categories need a manual plan, and doing that in a calm week rather than a deadline week is the difference between a migration and an incident.