Moving a whole school is a different job from importing a spreadsheet. Bring your school in takes everything at once — people, the timetable, what families owe, and your term dates — checks the numbers against your old system, and lets you undo the lot if it isn’t right.
Where it lives
Settings → Advanced → “Bring your school in”. It’s also offered during onboarding, at the fork that asks whether you’re moving from another tool or starting fresh.
Every member of staff can open the page, but importing is an owner or admin job; anyone else sees a plain locked state rather than a broken screen.
Nobody is emailed during an import No welcome messages, no invoices, no lesson reminders — not while it runs, and not because of it. You decide when families hear from you.
The six steps
- Upload everything. Say where you’re coming from — MyMusicStaff, a spreadsheet, or another tool. Choose MyMusicStaff and you get a checklist naming each export and exactly where to find it, so you’re not guessing which report to run. You can skip a file and come back to it.
- Confirm what we found. LessonLoop reads each file’s headers and labels it — contacts, family balances, timetable, terms — with a row count, so you can see at a glance that the right file went to the right place. Anything it doesn’t recognise opens a column mapper instead of being rejected.
- Preview and fix. One tab per thing being imported — students, families and guardians, staff, locations, timetable, balances, terms — each counting what’s new, what’s an update, what’s unchanged and what needs you. The things that need you are grouped by reason, and each group can be fixed for all its rows at once: pick a venue for 156 school lessons in one go rather than 156 times. Nothing has been written yet at this point.
- Import. It runs with progress per entity, and it’s resumable: close the tab, upload the same files again, and it carries on where it stopped. Nothing is ever imported twice.
- Check it agrees. A reconciliation table puts your export’s numbers next to what landed — including total owed and total in credit, to the penny. Every difference is either one you chose in step 3 or a link to the rows that caused it. You can download the reconciliation for your records, and undo the whole import while nothing else has changed.
- Tune what you’ll see. Terms are read from the gaps in your timetable for you to check, your prices become a rate card, and you confirm which parts of LessonLoop are switched on.
What comes across, and what doesn’t
Students, guardians, staff, locations, terms, closures, rates and the timetable come across — including school lessons with no fixed times, as registers.
Old invoices and attendance history stay in MyMusicStaff. What carries over is what actually matters going forward: each family’s balance, brought in as an opening balance on their account, so your statements start from the right number without importing years of paperwork.
Bringing across one teaching week rather than a whole school? Use import your timetable instead.
Was this out of date or unclear? Tell us — we keep these guides matched to the live app.