Migration
Leave the process, keep the paper
Departments do not adopt tools that ask them to abandon a decade of workbooks and a format everyone can read at a glance. So Medrota does not ask.
What imports
The whole workbook, marks and all
The parser reads the grid the way the department writes it: names with D1 and D2 suffixes, split slots, custom hours like 10-6, bold sessions, light-blue open seats, yellow holiday rows, the DL footer notes.
587
cells
128
bold sessions
19
split slots
0
unmatched names
“Wiin”, “Pasons”, “Rampertsad” matched to Win, Parsons, Rampersad automatically. Nothing commits until you confirm.
Dry run, always. Nothing touches the database until the summary reads correctly and you press commit. Re-import a month any time; replacing is explicit, never accidental.
Typo tolerant. Real sheets contain Wiin, Pasons and Rampertsad. Matching survives two edits of distance and shows you its work; anything less certain waits for your mapping.
History pays forward. Imported months feed the equity tallies, so the very first generated month already knows who has been carrying the weekends.
What exports
Cell for cell, colour for colour
The export rebuilds all three sheets of the legacy workbook: the grid in the full colour legend, the Night Shift Groups roster, and the Requests sheet with computed tallies. It has survived a round-trip test against a real department's June workbook, cell for cell.
The path
Four steps, no leap of faith
01
Day one
Recreate the department
Staff list with senior, med-resident and assess-capable flags, night groups A to D, the post template with its hours and weekend behaviour, public holidays, and the two cycle anchors. An afternoon of setup, all of it editable later.
02
Day one, an hour later
Import the archive
Upload the old workbooks month by month. Each import dry-runs first: you see cells, splits, bold sessions and D marks counted, typos matched, unknown names queued for a decision. Commit when it reads clean.
03
The first live month
Run both, trust one
Generate in Medrota, export, and lay it beside what the old process would have produced. The export is the same sheet your department already reads, so comparison is a glance, not a project.
04
From then on
The spreadsheet becomes an output
The workbook still exists for the noticeboard and the archive, but it is generated, not hand-built. Requests, trades, absences and claims live in the app; the export is one click, attached to the publish email.