Bring your members over
See it before it happens

How the import works

The import happens inside your account, during your free trial or any time after. Before anything is written, you see exactly what it will create.

1. Choose the system you use today. Kicksite, Spark Membership, Gymdesk, Mindbody and Zen Planner each have a card with the steps to export your members; anything else, or a spreadsheet, works through Something else.
2. Drop in your export, inside your account. One file from your old system: CSV, Excel (.xlsx), TXT or TSV, up to 10 MB.
3. Confirm what each column is. It suggests a match for every column, with example values from your own file; you decide.
4. See your families rebuilt, with the rule it used to group them, in one sentence. Pick another rule if it looks wrong.
5. Match each status word in your file to Active, Suspended, Inactive or Don’t import. Trial members start as Don’t import, because a trial is a lead here, not a member.
6. Review the real result: the import runs on your account and is rolled back, so you see every family and member it will create, your monthly rate before and after, and which of your automated emails would reach them. Then import.
7. Check it for yourself: a random sample of your file sits next to the records created from it, and any rows left out can be downloaded.
8. Undo it if you change your mind, before you start working with the people it brought in.

It brings across families, the people who pay, members, their status, and the dates each member joined, left and last visited, so your retention reports are right from the first day. What each member paid in your old system comes across for your reference only, and is never charged. The import tool is free, at any size. If you would rather we did the import for you, we can, for a fee.

Why we give this away

Moving data between membership systems is never automatic, because no two systems store a family, a membership status or a payment the same way. Someone has to make decisions about your data. The only real question is whether those decisions are made deliberately, or guessed by an importer that fails quietly.

A bad import is worse than no import. If your records do not move, you know it. If they move badly, you believe they are fine — until a parent is billed the wrong amount, a grading history turns out to be missing, or a report is wrong and nobody can say why.

So we would rather show you the awkward parts of your own data first, while you are still deciding.

What the checker actually does

The checker above is not a preview or a simplified copy. It is the importer’s own engine, running in your browser: the same column matching, the same families, the same questions, word for word. What it does not do is import. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is saved, nothing reaches us, and there is no account to create. Whatever it tells you about your file, your trial tells you too.

• Which column is which, from the headings, in English or Spanish, and from the values when a heading means nothing. A report title above the headings, semicolons instead of commas, or an Excel file are all fine.
• Your families, rebuilt, with the rule it used and how many households came out. Anyone it cannot place becomes a family of one, and the ones that look like they belong with someone are pointed out.
• The same person twice: same name and the same date of birth, email or phone, or a repeated member ID. Nothing is ever overwritten; you decide which rows to leave out.
• Dates that can be read two ways. 03/04/2019 is the third of April in one country and the fourth of March in another. When nothing in the column settles it, you are asked once which order your old system uses. It never picks for you.
• Your status words, Active, Frozen, Trial, Canceled, whatever you use, each to be matched by a person.
• What is missing that would cost you later: no join date for your retention reports, no adult to pay for a child, no email for the portal.

It sorts everything into what must be fixed, what needs a decision from you, what is worth a look, and what it found.

Your system stores members. We store households.

Almost every system in this market keeps a list of people, each with a note about who pays for them. It knows that Aiden is paid for by Maria. It does not really know that Aiden, Sofia and Maria are one family with one bill — that idea does not exist in it, so it is not in the export either.

Rebuilding that is most of the work of moving. The checker does it in front of you: it finds whatever your file uses to tie people together — an account number, the payer's email, a family name, or a shared phone and surname — groups your people by it, and tells you how many households came out and how many rows it could not place.

It also separates the adults who only pay from the adults who pay and train. That distinction is worth money: the first become contacts on the family and are not billable, the second are one contact and one member, counted once. Getting it wrong is the usual way a first invoice comes out too high.

The one that decides your invoice

Your rate here is based on your active and suspended members. So a member marked Frozen or On hold in your current system might or might not count, depending on what that word means in your business.

We will not guess at that. The checker lists every status word in your file, and each one is matched by a person before anything is loaded — because the alternative is somebody's first invoice being wrong, and that is not a mistake worth being efficient about.

What comes across, and what does not

Comes across: families, the people who pay, members, their status, the date each one joined and left, and their last visit. What each member paid in your old system and any open balance come across for reference only, beside each family while you set up billing. They are never charged.

Does not come across: attendance history and payment history. Run the checker above first, and you will know how clean your file is before you start.

We do not move stored card details, and no vendor should. Your members re-enter them once with your payment provider. Anything else would mean a software company handling card data that was never theirs to hold.

Questions

Does the file check import my members?

No. The check on this page only reads your file, inside your browser, to show you how it would come across. Nothing is uploaded or saved. Your members are imported only when you run the import from inside your own account, during your free trial or after it.

Can you import from Kicksite, Spark, Gymdesk, Zen Planner, Mindbody, Jackrabbit or PushPress?

Yes, from their member export. Kicksite, Spark Membership, Gymdesk, Mindbody and Zen Planner each have their own card in the importer with the steps to get the export out; for any other system, choose Something else. There is no one-click connector to any of them: the importer works from your export, and shows you everything it will do before it does it.

Can I move from TheDOJOApp?

Yes. The importer reads a spreadsheet of your members, so start by getting a member export out of TheDOJOApp, in Excel or CSV. There is no one-click connector to their system, and the checker on this page shows you how that file would come across before you import anything.

What does not come across?

Stored card details, attendance history and payment history. Card details should never move between vendors; your members re-enter them once with your payment provider. Each member's last visit does come across, so nobody looks absent since the day they joined.

Will my member statuses transfer correctly?

Only if a person maps them, which is why the importer asks you to match every status word in your file to Active, Suspended, Inactive or Don’t import rather than guessing. Trial members start as Don’t import, because a trial is a lead here, not a member. Your rate here depends on active and suspended members, so mapping a frozen or trial member wrongly would change your first invoice. We will not guess at that, and you should be suspicious of anything that does.

How long does it take?

Most of the time goes on the decisions only you can make: what each status word means, which column is which. A clean export takes minutes. The checker above tells you how clean yours is before you start.

What does it cost?

Nothing. The import tool is included, during your trial and after it, at any size. If you would rather we did the import for you, we can, for a fee.

Will I have to move again later?

No. You import once, and everything you bring in and set up stays in your account as BlackBeltCRM grows.

Will my families get an email when I import them?

No. The import itself sends nothing. Before you import, it also shows you whether any of your own automated emails, a welcome email for example, would reach the people you are bringing in, so there are no surprises.

What if the import gets something wrong?

You see the result before it is written, so most mistakes never happen. If one does, undo removes everything that import created, and nothing that was already in your account. Undo it before you start working with the imported people: once someone takes a payment, sets up billing or checks a member in, that import can no longer be undone.

I already have members here. Will the import change them?

No. People who are clearly already in your account are linked to their record and left as they are. For anyone who only might be the same person, you choose: same person or someone new.

Do I have to move everything at once?

No, and often you should not. The trial is free with every feature switched on, so bringing one program across and running it alongside what you have is a more honest test than any demo — including ours.