Day-by-day notes from a Bondi cosmetic clinic moving 6,400 patient records, eleven years of treatment history and an active S4 register across — without losing a booking or a script.
A Bondi-based cosmetic clinic — three injectors, two dermal therapists, a part-time prescribing GP and roughly 6,400 active patient files — switched to Ruevii in mid-March. They'd been on Pabau for eleven years. This is the playbook we ran. Nothing about it was easy, but very little was dramatic, and the clinic didn't miss a booking.
Why they moved
The owner had been quietly building a list of paper cuts: every front-desk request for an SMS template took a support ticket, the S4 register was a spreadsheet held together with macros, and the AI receptionist they kept hearing about elsewhere wasn't on Pabau's roadmap. None of it was urgent on its own. Together it added up to a system that was no longer growing with the clinic.
What pushed them was the renewal. Pabau's annual invoice landed in February. The owner did the maths on Ruevii — slightly less per seat, but the real swing was the consolidation of the SMS provider, the lead-capture form tool and the separate review platform into one product. The compounding line items, not the headline price, made the case.
The 14-day plan
Days 1-3 — Discovery and the dry run
- We ran Pabau's data export ourselves with the owner present. The export includes patients, appointments, financial transactions, forms and uploaded files. Treatment notes export as free text, not structured fields, which matters later.
- We mapped Pabau's services to Ruevii's service catalogue. 188 services in Pabau collapsed to 94 in Ruevii — most of the noise was duplicate services for different practitioners, which Ruevii handles via the practitioner-level pricing on a single service.
- We did a dry-run import into a staging Ruevii workspace and reconciled patient counts. Two patient records had been duplicated in Pabau over the years; we merged them before the live cut-over rather than after.
Days 4-6 — Templates, automations and the inbox
The clinic had sixty-one SMS templates and twenty-three email templates in Pabau. We didn't migrate them automatically. The owner went through them with a member of our onboarding team and culled to twenty-four — the ones that actually got sent in the last six months. The dead templates didn't make the trip. This was the single biggest quality-of-life win and took less than two hours.
Their three reminder automations (24-hour, 2-hour, post-treatment follow-up) got rebuilt in Ruevii's automation studio in about forty minutes. We also added a 'birthday voucher' workflow they'd wanted for years but never built.
Days 7-9 — S4 register and prescriber workflow
This was the part the owner was most anxious about. Pabau's S4 spreadsheet had eight years of entries. We didn't migrate the historical entries into Ruevii's S4 register — that would have meant fabricating data Ruevii didn't witness. Instead, we exported the spreadsheet to PDF, archived it in the clinic's secure document store with a timestamp, and started Ruevii's S4 register from day one of the new system. We documented the cut-over in writing so the assessor would have a clean chain of custody.
Days 10-11 — Calendar, deposits and the patient portal
- Calendar imported with appointments out 90 days. Beyond 90 days we left in Pabau and asked the front desk to re-book as the patients came in.
- Stripe connected, deposit and cancellation policies configured per service. The clinic moved from a 50% deposit to a flat $50 deposit on first visits and kept 50% on advanced treatments.
- The patient portal got branded with their logo and colour. Patients received a single SMS the day of cut-over with a link to the new portal and a one-tap login.
Days 12-14 — Training, the soft cut-over, and the audit
We ran two hour-long training sessions — one for clinical, one for front-of-house — both recorded so anyone who missed could catch up. We did not try to teach the whole product in one session. We taught the daily workflow: arrival, charting, payment, departure, follow-up. Everything else, the team would learn by doing.
Cut-over happened on a Wednesday — chosen because Tuesday and Wednesday are their lowest-volume days. We left Pabau live and read-only for a fortnight as a safety net. No one needed it after day three.
What broke (a little)
A handful of patient notes had been entered into Pabau's free-text fields with rich formatting — bold, bullets, embedded images. The bullets and bold survived; the embedded images came across as missing-image placeholders. We caught them in a dry-run and uploaded them as proper photo records during the cut-over week. About thirty patients were affected. None of them noticed because the records were re-attached before they were next seen.
One automation — a quarterly skin-treatment campaign — didn't have a clean Ruevii equivalent in time for the first quarter and got rebuilt the following month. The clinic sent a manual campaign in the meantime.
What it cost — in time, not just money
Two weeks of partial calendar capacity in the lead-up (about 8 hours of practitioner time spread across the team), one half-day completely blocked for cut-over, and one weekend of late-night work for me. The clinic was back at full booking capacity the Monday after cut-over.
The thing nobody tells you about migrating is that the real saving isn't in the new software. It's in the conversations you have while choosing what not to migrate.
If you're considering it
Pick the slowest fortnight of your calendar year. Be honest with your team about the disruption. Cull aggressively at the template stage. Don't migrate S4 history; archive it. Run the old system read-only for two weeks. Train daily workflow, not feature exhaustiveness. And take the call with us before you start — there are eleven small decisions in any migration that are easier to make once than to undo later.