Moving your lab off its current software
What SamLab can import from your current lab software, what it cannot, what you need to prepare, and what happens to the old system during changeover.
The short answer
Migrating to SamLab is a hands-on service, not a self-serve importer. SamLab has no "import my old software" wizard, and we would rather tell you that than sell you one. You export what you have from your current system to Excel or CSV; we map it, clean it and load it into your database before you go live, and we do a parallel run with you so nothing is discovered on a busy Monday. The one file importer built into the product is the bank-statement reader used for reconciliation — everything else is loaded by us, with you.
Can SamLab import my old lab software data?
Migrating to SamLab is a hands-on service, not a self-serve importer. You export what you have to Excel or CSV; it is then mapped, cleaned and loaded into your database before go-live, followed by a parallel run. The only importer inside the product reads bank statements for reconciliation.
What actually comes across
Six data sets, and the honest verdict on each. The caveats are the half that decides whether your first month goes well, so they are on the page rather than in a meeting.
Patient master
Loaded from your exportYour whole patient list moves, but SamLab issues its own patient ID — your old numbers do not become the SamLab PID.
What we need from you: One Excel/CSV sheet, one row per patient, exported from your current software.
What moves
- Name, mobile, gender, and age or date of birth
- Address, email and ID-proof reference
- Patient type (OPD / IPD and the rest of your own list)
- The referring doctor, once the doctor master is loaded first
- A second-script name (for example Arabic beside Latin), where you keep one
What to know first
- SamLab allocates its own patient ID — a prefix you choose plus a six-digit serial — and it is fixed once the record exists. Your legacy patient numbers cannot be carried in as the SamLab PID.
- What we do carry across is the SERIES: we set the counter so your first new registration continues from where the old system stopped, instead of restarting at 000001.
- Your front desk finds patients by name and by mobile, both of which are indexed for it, so day-to-day search does not depend on the old number.
- Mobile numbers are the practical de-duplication key. If your export has the same patient three times under three spellings, that arrives as three patients unless you clean it or ask us to.
Test & panel catalogue with prices
Partly — read the caveatsUsually not a migration at all — SamLab ships a curated catalogue, so what actually moves is your price list mapped onto it.
What we need from you: Your current rate list as Excel/CSV: test name (and your code, if you use one), your rate, plus B2B and home-collection rates if you run them.
What moves
- Your rate against each test, including separate B2B and home-collection rates
- Package and profile pricing
- Tests you run that are not already in the curated catalogue, added with their parameters, units and reference ranges
- Your own test codes, where you want to keep quoting them
What to know first
- SamLab already arrives with a curated catalogue: atomic billable tests, clinical panels and health packages, pre-configured with parameters, units, methods and standard adult reference ranges. Most labs are better off pricing that catalogue than importing a decade of accumulated duplicates.
- Mapping "is your CBC the same as this CBC" is a clinical question, not a technical one. It needs someone from your lab for an hour or two; we cannot answer it from a spreadsheet.
- Reference ranges ship as standard adult ranges. If your lab has validated its own ranges — and an accredited lab should have — those are yours to set, and we will not silently overwrite them with ours.
Doctor & referral master
Loaded from your exportLoads cleanly from a spreadsheet, commission terms included.
What we need from you: One Excel/CSV sheet, one row per referring doctor or referral source.
What moves
- Name, specialisation, phone, email and address
- Referral source
- Commission terms — a percentage or a flat amount per doctor
- Active / inactive status, so retired referrers stop appearing in billing
What to know first
- Commission RULES load; historical commission PAYOUTS do not. Settle the old ledger in the old system and start SamLab from a clean slate on the cut-off date — chasing a half-paid commission across two systems is how the first month goes wrong.
- Corporate and B2B accounts are a separate master with their own credit limits and rate lists, and are loaded the same way.
Historical results
Not a bulk loadThis is the one to be realistic about: we do not rebuild years of parameter-level results from your old system, and no honest vendor will.
What we need from you: Whatever your old system can produce — a PDF archive is the usual answer, and it is a perfectly good one.
What moves
- Old report PDFs, attached to the patient so the front desk can hand one over without opening the old software
- A defined recent window — commonly the last few months — re-entered as real results where you genuinely need trending or a delta check
What to know first
- Re-keying parameter-level history is a data-entry project priced by the row, not an import. For most labs it stops being worth it past about a year, and past three it almost never is.
- A PDF is not a result. An attached old report prints and hands over fine; it does not feed a delta check, a trend graph or a result-history block, because those need the numbers as numbers.
- The usual answer, and the one we recommend, is: keep the old system readable for lookups (see retention below), attach PDFs where it helps the counter, and let SamLab own everything from the cut-off date forward.
Outstanding balances
Loaded from your exportTwo routes, and the right one depends on whether you need the dues to age or only to total.
What we need from you: An ageing / outstanding report from your current system as Excel/CSV, as at your cut-off date.
What moves
- Unpaid patient and corporate bills, entered back-dated to their real dates so the outstanding ages correctly and the follow-up list is right from day one
- Ledger opening balances in the Chart of Accounts, where you only need the totals to be right — each account carries an opening balance and a Dr/Cr side
- Patient advances and part-payments, so a half-paid bill does not reappear as fully due
What to know first
- Back-dated bills are the better route for anything you will chase, because a total sitting in one opening-balance line tells you nothing about who owes it or since when.
- Opening balances are the better route for bank, cash and expense ledgers, where reconstructing individual transactions serves no purpose.
- Pick one per ledger and stick to it. Doing both to the same account double-counts, and it is easier to prevent than to unpick.
Bank statements
Loaded from your exportThe one genuinely self-serve importer in the product — you run this yourself, every month, forever.
What we need from you: Your bank’s own CSV account statement. Presets ship for HDFC, ICICI, State Bank of India, Kotak Mahindra and Axis.
What moves
- Date, narration, cheque / UTR reference, withdrawal and deposit, per row
- Straight into bank reconciliation against your receipts
What to know first
- This is a reconciliation tool, not a migration tool — it is listed here so you can see exactly where the line between "SamLab imports it" and "we load it for you" falls.
- A bank outside those five works too, but the columns have to be matched once; send us a sample statement.
What you need to prepare
Six things only your lab can do. None of them is difficult; all of them are slower to do halfway through a migration than before one starts.
Get an export out of your current software
Excel or CSV, one sheet per master — patients, doctors, rate list, outstanding. Ask your current vendor in writing and check what your contract with them says about your data. If they will not export, a printed or PDF register can still be typed up, but that is a data-entry project and should be priced as one before anyone starts.
Pick a cut-off date
One date, in writing, that everyone in the lab knows. Bills before it belong to the old system; bills on and after it belong to SamLab. Ambiguity here is what produces two invoice numbers for the same patient on the same day.
Clean the patient list, or tell us not to
Duplicates, blank mobiles and "Patient" as a name are normal in a ten-year-old database. Decide whether you want them merged on the way in or carried across as-is — both are fine, but it is your call and not ours to make silently.
Freeze the rate list
Send the rate list you will actually go live on, not the one you are still arguing about. A price change mid-migration means re-checking every mapped test.
Name someone who can answer test questions
One person in the lab, reachable for a couple of hours. The hard part of any lab migration is deciding which of your old entries is the same test as which catalogue entry, and that is a clinical judgement.
Keep the old system running
Do not cancel it the week you switch. You will want it during the parallel run, and you will need it afterwards for the retention period below.
The changeover, week by week
Nothing here is exotic. It is the sequence that keeps a discrepancy cheap by finding it during a parallel run instead of at month-end.
Before: load into a trial database
Your export goes into a SamLab install you can open and poke at, not into the machine you bill on. You check your own patients, your own rates and your own doctors, by name, before anything is committed.
Parallel run: about a week
Register and bill in both systems for a few days. Print from SamLab, keep printing from the old one, and compare a full day’s collection totals and test counts at close. Discrepancies found in a parallel week are cheap; the same discrepancies found in the month-end are not.
Cut-over: one morning
On the cut-off date the front desk stops entering into the old system. Outstanding balances are loaded as at that morning, and the patient-number series is set to continue from the last number the old system issued.
After: the old system goes read-only
It stays installed, on a machine that still boots, with nobody entering into it. That is not caution for its own sake — see retention, below.
What happens to your old software afterwards
It stays. Switching software does not end the obligation to be able to produce what it holds, and the retention clock is set by law and by your accreditation body — not by either vendor.
Your GST books are statutory. A registered person must retain books of account and records until seventy-two months (six years) from the due date of furnishing the annual return for that year — and longer where an appeal, revision, proceeding or investigation is on foot, for one year after its final disposal, whichever is later. Your billing history in the old software is part of those books, so switching software does not end the obligation to be able to produce it.
Source: Central Goods and Services Tax Act, 2017 — section 36, Period of retention of accounts · checked 2026-08-08. General information, not tax advice — confirm the position for your own registration with your chartered accountant.
Separately from tax law, your accreditation body’s criteria and your own SOP set how long reports and raw data must be kept, and those periods differ by discipline. Get the current issue of the applicable criteria document from your accreditation body and follow that. Do not take a retention number from a software vendor’s website — including this one.
And if you ever leave SamLab
You are on this page because leaving a system is hard. So here is the exit, published before you buy rather than discovered afterwards.
Your database is a standard SQLite file on your own machine. Not a proprietary container, not a vault we hold the key to.
Backup writes a single archive containing that database file plus the report documents attached to it. It is an ordinary ZIP with no passphrase, and Restore reads it back on any other PC — that is also how you move SamLab to a new computer yourself.
Every report screen in the app exports to Excel and to PDF, so any list you can see, you can take.
Which means switching AWAY from SamLab is the same exercise as switching to it. We would rather you knew that before you buy than discover it if you ever leave.
Your data belongs to you — see the terms.
Coming from a specific product?
The migration route is the same for all of them — an Excel or CSV export, mapped and loaded. These comparisons cover what changes about the day-to-day once you have moved.
Running something not listed? Send a sample export to our team and we will tell you what will and will not come across.
Migration FAQs
Does SamLab have a data import wizard?+
No. There is no self-serve importer for patients, tests or doctors inside SamLab, and we do not claim one. Migration is done with you: you send an Excel or CSV export from your current software, we map and load it, and you check it in a trial database before going live. The only file importer built into the product is the bank-statement reader used for reconciliation, which ships with presets for HDFC, ICICI, State Bank of India, Kotak Mahindra and Axis.
Can you import 40,000 patient records?+
Yes — the patient master is a routine load, and its size is not the hard part. What takes the time is deciding what to do with the duplicates and blank fields that a database that old always contains. Send the export and we will tell you what is in it before anyone commits to a date.
Will my existing patient ID numbers be kept?+
Not as the SamLab patient ID. SamLab allocates its own — a prefix you choose plus a six-digit serial — and it is fixed once the record exists. What we do carry across is the series: the counter is set so your first new registration continues from the last number your old system issued, rather than restarting at 1. Your front desk searches by name and mobile in any case, both of which are indexed for it.
What format do you need from my current software?+
Excel or CSV, which every lab system can produce. There is no direct connector to any specific competitor product, and we would be suspicious of a vendor who claimed one — those exports are the realistic route. If your current vendor refuses to give you an export, check what your contract with them says about your own data.
Can you bring across historical test results?+
Only partly, and this is worth being clear about before you buy. Old report PDFs can be attached to the patient so your counter can hand one over without opening the old software. Re-keying parameter-level results as actual numbers is a data-entry project priced by the row, and for most labs it stops being worth it past about a year. The usual answer is to keep the old system readable for lookups and let SamLab own everything from the cut-off date forward.
How do outstanding patient balances move over?+
Two ways, and you pick one per ledger. Unpaid bills can be entered back-dated to their real dates, so the outstanding ages correctly and your follow-up list is right from day one — this is the right route for anything you intend to chase. Or, where only the total matters, a single opening balance is set on the ledger account with its Dr/Cr side. Doing both to the same account double-counts, so we agree the split with you in advance.
Do I have to uninstall my old lab software?+
No, and you should not. Your billing history is part of your statutory books: under section 36 of the CGST Act, 2017, a registered person must retain books of account and records until seventy-two months from the due date of furnishing the annual return for that year, and longer if an appeal or investigation is running. Keep the old system installed and readable, with nobody entering into it. Your accreditation body and your own SOP separately set how long reports and raw data must be kept — get that period from them, not from a software website.
How long does a migration take, and what does it cost?+
We quote after seeing your export, and before any work starts, because the effort is mapping and cleaning and its size is the size of your file. SamLab charges no separate setup or onboarding fee for the software itself — the licence price on the pricing page is the licence price. What we will not do is give you a number over the phone for a file we have not opened.
Can I try SamLab on my own data before committing?+
Yes, and you should. The 7-day free trial runs on your own machine with no card, so you can register real patients and print a real report before any migration is discussed. Bring a sample of your export to the demo and we will tell you honestly what will and will not come across.
Last reviewed 2026-08-08. Everything on this page describes SamLab as it ships today, not as it is planned — see the roadmap for what is coming.
Try the whole lab, free for 7 days.
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