🧠Moving your club's history across
You have imported the members from your old system. What you have not brought is everything that came before it: what each member has paid over the years, and what the club has sent them. A club that loses that on the day it switches has not moved its records, it has started again — and the committee that agreed the switch will hear about it. This is the run through doing it properly.
1Do the members first
History attaches to people, so the people have to be there. Members → Import, and get that finished and checked before you start on this. If a member is missing, their history has nothing to attach to and will be reported as unmatched.
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2Take the two templates
Same screen, under Bring their history across too. One for the activity log, one for the payments. The column headings already match what your old system calls them.
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3Add the two columns nobody else gives you
Member and Email, at the front. Most systems show one person’s history at a time and their tables carry no name at all, so without those two there is nothing to attach a row to. Fill them in as you paste each person’s history under the last.
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4Do one member first
Paste one person’s history, press Try it first, and read the counts. Nothing is written. Getting the columns wrong on one member costs a minute; getting them wrong on four hundred costs an evening.
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5Check the dates came out right
Import that one member for real and open their record. Dates are read the British way — 05/08/2026 is the fifth of August. If a payment has landed in the wrong month, stop: your export is in American order and every date in it will be wrong by up to eleven months.
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?Then do the rest, in batches
A hundred at a time is comfortable. Running it again is safe — anything already imported is recognised and skipped, and the second run tells you how many.
Everything matched → carry on to the next batch. | Some say no member matched → they are listed by name at the end. Usually an email address that has changed since, or a name spelt differently in the two systems. Put it right in the sheet and run that batch again. |
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7Tell the treasurer what this is not
The imported payments are a record on the member, deliberately outside the accounts. 2021’s payment belongs in 2021’s books, which are closed and examined. If the old years are wanted in the accounts as well, that is an opening balance and a different conversation.
💡 Tip: Your old system probably shows only the most recent fifty entries per screen. That is generally the whole of somebody’s payment history and only part of a busy member’s email log. Take what it gives you: fifty entries of context is a great deal more than none.