Admissions

From spreadsheet to applicant tracking: five steps

The decision is made. What is left is not a purchase but a move: knowing what you take, what you leave in the archive, and who holds the keys on Monday morning.

4 September 20265 min readBy the GEERD team

An admissions migration rarely fails for a technical reason. The rows almost always come across. What does not come across is the knowledge that was written down nowhere: the rule one person applied from memory, the column whose heading means nothing to anyone now, the three files you did not know existed.

That is why the sequence below is held by your team, not by a supplier. We prepare the ground, carry the data over and set up what needs setting up. But the decisions (what is kept, what is archived, what the stages are called) belong to the people who will live with them.

Count in weeks, not in days. The long part is never the transfer.

Four questions before you start

If any one of them has no written answer, the migration will start too early, and end in a tool nobody opens.

Why now? To stop losing applicants, to have a figure you can trust, to stop depending on one person? The answer decides what gets looked at first.
Who will use the tool? Admissions, of course, but also leadership, the registry, communications, finance. Anyone left out at this stage becomes a parallel file six months later.
What do we take with us? A contact who has not replied in three years is not history, it is noise. Deciding beforehand saves deciding in the middle of the transfer.
Who carries the project to the leadership? A migration inevitably crosses a busy stretch. Without someone answering for it in the room, it stops at the first hard week.

The five steps, in this order

The order matters: each step produces what the next one needs. The temptation is always to start at the second.

01Inventory, then cleanYour team
List every admissions file that exists, department by department: there are nearly always more than expected. Then merge the duplicates, make the phone and date formats consistent, and decide what goes to the archive rather than into the new tool. This is the step everyone wants to shorten, and the one that decides the rest: what goes in dirty comes out dirty.
02Write the process before choosing the toolTogether
Set your stages down in the order they actually happen (application received, file complete, interview, decision, confirmation), and name them the way your team already names them. Decide who sees what and who decides what. Draft your message templates, and map each spreadsheet column onto a field, or onto nothing at all. Until that plan exists on one page, no configuration is possible: you are only reproducing the mess elsewhere.
03Migrate a sample, and have it readTogether
Carry across a hundred applicants first, not the whole base. This is where the real problems surface: a date that flips, accented characters that break, a field that lands in the wrong place. Have it read by the people who will use it daily: they alone can see what is missing. A mistake caught in a hundred records is a correction; the same one in five thousand is a bill.
04Switch over on a chosen dateYour team
Back the files up as they are, carry the active applicants over first, then the history, and check the counts on both sides before calling the switchover done. Pick a quiet stretch: not the day before an intake, not the middle of a campaign. And announce a precise hour after which nobody writes in the old files again: without it you keep two versions of the truth, and they diverge on day one.
05Hold the first three monthsYour team
Train by role rather than in one joint session, appoint one or two people per department who can unblock the others, and leave a one-page sheet for the everyday actions. Come back at thirty days, then at sixty: that is when the irritations surface, and when the configuration is still easy to adjust. A team nobody revisits after the switchover quietly goes back to the file, and nobody will tell you.

The mistakes that keep coming back

These are not technical either: four ways of saving time at the start and giving it back later.

Expecting the tool to clean up

No transfer corrects a duplicate or guesses a spelling. Cleaning is a step of the project, with someone answering for it and a date on it, or it does not happen.

Taking everything, to be safe

Carrying ten years of contacts across means starting with a base nobody believes. Archive them elsewhere: the data stays consultable without clogging the tracking.

Leaving the project to leadership and IT

The people who handle the records know where the process jams. If they discover the tool on switchover day, they will endure it rather than own it.

Treating the switchover as the finish

Transfer day is not the arrival, it is day one. The three months after it decide whether the tool becomes the team’s reflex or one more screen.

The right moment

The window exists, and it is short: just after an intake, when the next campaign has not started and the people who know the process are still available. A migration launched mid-campaign is paid for twice, because the same people keep the old method going while learning the new one, in the hours when families call.

If the window has passed, the right decision is not to force it. It is to do step one anyway. The inventory and the cleaning need no tool, they happen inside your current files, and they shorten the migration on the day it does take place.

What to take away

Moving from a spreadsheet to applicant tracking is not an IT project. It is a clarification: what you track, in what order, and who answers for it. The tool records that decision; it does not take it for you.

There is one thing to do this week, and it costs nothing: open a document and list every admissions file in the institution, with the name of the person who keeps each one. If that list surprises you, step one has already begun.