Switch home care software in 7 days, free
We migrate your current carers, service users, care plans and rota for free, and you are working in homecareOS within 7 days of sending us your exports.
The thing that keeps agencies on software they have outgrown is rarely the software. It is the fear of the move. Here is exactly what comes across, who does the work, and what happens if it goes wrong.
Seven things move, and they keep their relationships
Not a flat dump of contacts. Visits stay attached to the right service user and the right carer, and training and background checks stay attached to the person they belong to.
Your people
- Carers, with contact details and start dates
- Service users, with addresses and care details
- Worker registrations for SCW, SSSC and NISCC
Your operation
- Visits and rota history
- Care plans
Your compliance evidence
- Background checks including DBS, with numbers and expiry dates
- Training records, providers, completion and expiry
Everything is imported from CSV, which is the one format nearly every home care platform can produce, whether or not it wants to help you leave.
What stays behind: care notes and medication (MAR) history. The importer takes the seven record types above and nothing else, so past notes and MAR charts stay in your previous provider's export. Keeping that export safe is also how your retention duty is met.
We run the migration, you check it
You are not handed an importer and wished well. Before any data moves, we agree a written migration plan with you. Today the homecareOS team runs migrations directly: you send the exports, we map your columns onto our fields, and you look at a preview of exactly what will be created before anything is committed.
That preview matters. Field names differ between platforms, dates arrive in three different formats, and names come through as "Smith, Jane" as often as "Jane Smith". Those are the things that quietly corrupt an import, and they are the things a preview catches.
Self-service migration is on the roadmap. It is not how it works today, and we would rather say so than imply you will be doing this alone at eleven at night.
Every import can be undone
Each row created by a migration is stamped with the import that created it. If something is not right, the whole import is reversed in one step rather than unpicked by hand. A care plan your team has already started editing is the one deliberate exception: it is left in place rather than thrown away, and the undo tells you which.
The record of what was attempted survives the undo, so a second attempt is informed by the first instead of starting blind. In practice this changes the emotional temperature of the whole exercise: an import becomes something you try, look at, and redo if needed.
There is also no size limit. The licence prices carers rather than capping them, so an import is never refused because your agency is too big or your history too long.
Free migration for your live data
Two different jobs, priced differently. Your live data is free and moves within 7 days. The only part of a migration we charge for is history.
Live data, free
Your current carers, current service users, their care plans and the running rota. This is everything you need to open homecareOS on a Monday morning and carry on working, and there is no charge for it. From the day we receive your exports, it is loaded, checked with you and ready within 7 days.
Plenty of the market prices this. Access publish implementation fees on their G-Cloud listing running from £720 to several thousand depending on the product and tier, and everyLIFE file a typical one off fee of £3,600 for implementation and training. We would rather not put a toll on the way in. A charge to get your data into a system sits uncomfortably close to a charge to get it out, and one of those is the thing agencies fear most about switching.
History, priced on people and years
Past service users, staff who have left, and old visits are a separate job, and it is the one part of a migration we charge for. The price depends on two things: how many people the history covers, and how many years of records each of them has.
So two years of history for a small agency costs far less than six years for a large one. You get the quote before any work starts, and the history follows on its own timetable, so it never holds up your 7-day switch.
It is also optional. Your statutory retention duty can be met by keeping your old provider's export, so bringing history into the new system is a convenience rather than a requirement.
What to ask your current provider for
This is the part agencies leave too late. Ask for it early, in writing, because export requests have a way of quietly consuming a notice period.
Ask for a full CSV export of
- Clients or service users
- Staff or carers
- The rota and visit history, with dates and times
- Care plans
- Training records
- Background checks
Know where you stand
Under UK GDPR you have a right to receive personal data you have provided in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format. The records your agency has put into a system are your operational history, not a hostage.
If a provider will only offer PDFs, or charges an unexpected fee to release your own data, that is worth knowing before you give notice rather than after.
Moving from Birdie specifically?
There is a longer walkthrough of that route, including what Birdie exports well and where the gaps usually are.
The ones agencies ask before they give notice
Talk it through before you commit to anything
Send us a sample export and we will tell you honestly what will come across cleanly and what will need attention. No obligation, and no pressure to give notice on anything first.