Skip to content

Moving to Lupa

What to set up first when you move from another system, what Lupa does not import, and why new recurring schedules should start today or later.

This page is for admins. Technicians need only accept their invite — see Joining a company you were invited to.

There is no import

Lupa has no import from another system: no spreadsheet upload and no transfer from another scheduling or invoicing product. Customers, service locations, recurring schedules and your team are entered in Lupa directly. Keep your old system to hand for reference while you enter them, and plan the move around the order below.

Set things up in this order

Each step depends on the one before it.

  1. Finish the setup wizard. Timezone, pricing model, team, text messaging and how you pay Lupa — see the first-run setup wizard. The timezone decides which day recurring visits land on, and the pricing model decides whether visits are priced as they are created, so set both before you enter any work.
  2. Start text-messaging registration early. Approval takes a few days, and until your number is registered no texts go out to customers. Start it from the wizard's Messaging step or see Registering your texting number.
  3. Invite your team. Each person gets an invite email and joins by accepting it. See Inviting people.
  4. Enter customers and their service locations. A visit is booked at a service location, so every customer needs at least one, with an address Lupa can find on the map — a location with no address, or one Lupa could not locate, cannot take a visit. See Customers. Record the dogs at each location as you go — see Pets and site details. Under Dogs × Cadence Matrix the price comes from the number of pets recorded at the location, and a visit at a location with none is created without a price.
  5. Carry over texting consent. For a customer who already agreed to texts with your old system and whose record of that you keep, choose Mark as approved under SMS consent on their file — see Record consent you already have. For everyone else, choose Request SMS opt-in — see Getting customer consent.
  6. Set up recurring schedules, starting today or later — see below and Recurring schedules.
  7. Put each account you bill regularly on a billing schedule. Open the customer under Clients, set Rollup billing to a Cadence and a Next billing date, and choose Save rollup billing. Without a next billing date an account's completed visits are never rolled into an invoice by themselves — see Monthly and automatic billing.
  8. Book one-off visits that are already arranged — see Booking and changing visits.
  9. Connect how you get paid, if you use it — see Online payments and QuickBooks.

Start new recurring schedules today or later

How it works. A recurring schedule's Start Date is the first day its rule applies. Lupa treats every occurrence between the start date and yesterday as a visit that should already have happened. If you enter a schedule with a start date in the past to mirror when the customer really started, Lupa does not treat those past dates as history. Each night it records the past occurrences — as far back as 30 days — as missed visits, raises a missed-visits alarm to every admin, and carries the missed work forward onto a visit at that location.

To move an existing recurring customer across

  1. Find the customer's next real service date in your old system.
  2. Create the schedule in Lupa with that date — today or later — as its Start Date.
  3. Stop booking that customer's future visits in your old system from that date.

If you already entered a past start date. Expect a missed-visits alarm after the next nightly check, which runs at 02:00 UTC (in the Americas, that is the evening of the same day), with the missed work carried onto a visit at that location. Clear the alarm from the bell once you have checked the board — see Notifications — and handle that visit on the board as you would any other.