Nearly every physiotherapy practice starts on a spreadsheet, and that is not a failure of organisation. A spreadsheet is fast, free, offline and completely under your control, which is more than can be said for a lot of software.
What follows is not an argument that you should leave it. It is what to do if you have already decided, because that is the part nobody writes down and the part where a straightforward change turns into a lost month.
The three signals that it is time
Not patient numbers. These three:
- You are editing the same file on two devices. The moment a record exists in two versions, you have no record — you have two drafts and a guess about which is current.
- Someone asked you for a report at short notice and it took an evening. A GP, an insurer, a solicitor, a patient moving city.
- You have stopped being sure who has paid. Especially with packages, where the answer requires reconstruction rather than a look.
Any of those twice in a month is the signal. One of them once is a bad week.
What to migrate, and what to leave behind
This is the decision that determines whether switching takes an afternoon or a month, and most people get it wrong in the same direction: they try to bring everything.
| Bring | Leave behind |
|---|---|
| The patient list: name, contact, date of birth, main condition | Years of session notes. Keep the original as an archive instead |
| Current balances — who owes what, today | Historical payments already reconciled with your accountant |
| Active packages and how many sessions remain | Packages finished last year |
| Appointments for the next two or three weeks | Last year’s diary |
| A one-line summary for each active patient | Patients you have not seen in two years, until they return |
The one-line summary is the trick that makes this work. For each active patient, one sentence: what is wrong, what you have been doing, where you are in the plan. Twenty patients is about forty minutes. It gives you a usable record from day one without transcribing anything, and the old file stays exactly where it is for anything older.
Cleaning the list before it goes anywhere
Importing a messy list produces a messy system, and cleaning it afterwards is slower because you are now clicking rather than dragging.
Before exporting, in the spreadsheet:
- One patient per row, one header row, no merged cells, no blank rows in the middle, no notes-to-self in column M.
- Split first and last names into separate columns if you can. It is thirty seconds with a formula and it saves fixing them one at a time later.
- Make phone numbers consistent, ideally in international format. This is the field that causes the most mess later.
- Delete the duplicates you already know about. The same person entered twice with different spellings.
- Mark who is actually active. A column with yes or no. Then import the active ones first.
The import itself
In Physioly it goes like this, and most products work similarly enough that the sequence is useful anyway:
- Save the spreadsheet as .xlsx or CSV.
- Upload it. The columns are recognised automatically; you correct anything that landed in the wrong place.
- Look at the preview. Every patient appears on screen before anything is saved. This is the step people skip and then regret.
- Obvious duplicates are flagged and skipped rather than created twice.
- Confirm. It is done in seconds.
Then spot-check five patients by hand, including one with an accent in their name and one with a foreign phone number. If those five are right, the rest almost certainly are.
Paper records: the honest answer
No import helps with paper. There is no feature, in any product, that turns a filing cabinet into a database, and any vendor implying otherwise is selling you an OCR experiment.
What works: keep the paper file as the archive for as long as your regulator requires, write the one-line summary for active patients, and start clean records in the software from the next appointment. Every patient you see moves across naturally within a couple of months, and you will have retyped nothing.
Do not destroy the old records once they are "in the system". Retention obligations apply to the original record, and they are measured in years — longer still for minors. Keep them safe and readable, whatever the new software does.
Pick a date and mean it
Choose a day. Ideally the start of a quiet week, ideally not the week before you go away. From that morning, every new appointment, note and payment goes into the new system. Nothing goes into the spreadsheet — not one thing, not just this once.
Tell anyone else who touches the diary the same date, in writing.
An afternoon is usually enough
Import the list, put next week in the diary, write three notes. The first seven days have no limits at all, which is exactly the shape of a switch.
Create a free account → No credit card. The first 7 days have no limits at all.Why running both in parallel fails
It sounds prudent: keep the spreadsheet going for a month, just in case. In practice it fails for a reason that has nothing to do with software.
Double entry is tedious, so within about ten days you stop doing one of them — usually whichever you are not standing in front of. Now the two disagree, and you cannot tell which is right without checking both. You have not reduced risk; you have created a second source of truth and lost the ability to tell which is which.
The safe version is different: make the spreadsheet read-only from the cutover date. Keep it, consult it, never write to it. All the safety, none of the ambiguity.
The first fortnight, realistically
- Days one to three. Everything takes slightly longer. Notes especially, because you are learning where things are while someone waits. This is normal and it ends.
- Day four or five. The first "how do I do X" moment. Ask support rather than inventing a workaround — workarounds invented in week one have a way of becoming permanent.
- End of week one. Notes are faster than they were on paper. This is the point where most people stop thinking about it.
- Week two. Set up the things you postponed: report templates, payment methods, the assessment forms you actually use.
- End of week two. Run an export. Not because you are leaving — because knowing the export works is the difference between using software and depending on it.
Budget the fortnight, not the afternoon. The import is fast. The habit change is two weeks, and practices that plan for it stop switching back. The ones that expect instant fluency tend to blame the software for a learning curve that any product would have.
Questions we get asked
How do I move my patient list from Excel into physiotherapy software?
Export or save your spreadsheet as .xlsx or CSV with one patient per row and a header row, then import it. Physioly recognises the columns on its own, shows every patient on screen before anything is saved and skips obvious duplicates. Clean the list before importing rather than after — it is far quicker.
Should I migrate my full treatment history into a new system?
Usually not. Migrate the patient list, current balances and future appointments; keep the old history readable as an archive. Retyping years of notes is weeks of work, and a transcribed note is a weaker record than the original anyway. Keep the original for as long as your regulator requires.
How long does switching to practice management software take?
For a solo physiotherapist with a clean spreadsheet: an afternoon for the import, plus two weeks of being slightly slower while habits change. What makes it take a month is an unclean list, no cutover date, or running both systems at once.
Can I import my appointments as well as my patients?
Patients import cleanly from Excel or CSV. Future appointments are usually quicker to rebook than to import, because a diary is small — two weeks ahead is typically a couple of dozen bookings and rebooking them is also how you learn the diary.
What if I decide the new system is not for me?
Then you export and leave, which is exactly why export matters more than most features. In Physioly export is available on every plan including the free one. Ask the same question of any product before you import anything into it.