Move your records without hoping for the best.
The hard part of changing systems is not the import. It is not knowing whether the import worked. RescueSphere shows you what will happen before anything is written, then asks you to check what arrived.
Animals and people import from CSV — the export every rescue system offers.
Three steps, and you can stop at any of them.
Nothing is written to your account until you say so. You can load a file, read the report, decide it is not ready, and walk away having changed nothing.
Match your columns
Upload a CSV and RescueSphere proposes a match for each column — “Microchip #” to microchip number, and so on. You correct anything it got wrong.
It remembers the corrections. The second file from the same system maps itself, which matters because migrations are rarely one file.
Read what would happen
Before a single record is created, you get a report of what this file will actually do: how many rows import cleanly, which rows will not and why, duplicates inside the file, and records that already exist in your account.
It is advice, not a gate. Rescue data is messy and always has been — you can import anyway. The point is that nothing is a surprise afterwards.
Check it and sign off
A review screen counts everything in your account and offers real records to open — because “412 animals” tells you nothing about whether the right 412 arrived.
When it looks right, you sign off. The numbers you signed are kept as they were, so later you can see exactly what has changed since.
What the pre-import check looks for
These are the four questions worth answering while backing out still costs nothing. Once four hundred duplicate people are in the database, finding them is a much worse job than not creating them.
Rows that will not import
Grouped by reason rather than listed one by one, so twenty rows with twenty different malformed dates read as one problem affecting twenty rows — not twenty problems.
Duplicates inside the file
The same animal or person appearing twice in one spreadsheet, which is normal in an export assembled from more than one source.
Records you already have
Re-importing a corrected file is the normal way a migration goes. People are matched on email so a second pass updates rather than duplicating.
Columns that are mostly empty
Usually the sign of a column mapped to the wrong field, or one your old system never really filled in. Better to know before than to wonder later.
What this does not cover
We would rather you read this here than discover it halfway through a changeover.
- Animals, people, households, foster placements, open applications, medical records, and documents all import themselves. Completed adoption history has no self-serve importer yet — it's deliberately last on our own priority list, since it matters far less on day one than what's currently happening. The review screen still counts it, so whatever you add by hand is included in what you sign off on — and if you need that history moved, our onboarding team does migrations by hand, free for Founding Rescues.
- There is no one-click transfer from another platform. You export a CSV from your current system and load it here. We are building direct importers, and we are starting with the systems the rescues we talk to are actually leaving — so if you tell us yours, that is a real input.
- Very large files are checked in part. The pre-import report reads the first several thousand rows and tells you when it stopped, rather than quietly reporting on a sample as though it were the whole file.
Try it with your own export.
The pre-import check is the honest way to evaluate this: load a real file from your current system during your 30-day trial and read the report. Nothing is written until you choose to import.