Switching to Pet Friend

Move your shelter's records over without losing a thing

Changing systems feels risky — that's why most shelters put it off. Whether you're coming from paper, spreadsheets, or another platform, Pet Friend is animal shelter software designed to make the switch low-stress. Here's how migration works.

What you can bring with you

Animal records — intake details, photos, medical history, and status
Adoption, foster, and contact records
Kennel and location structure

How migration works

1. Export your data. Pull your existing records out of your current system or spreadsheet. If you're on another shelter platform, you typically own the right to export your own data — see our note on data ownership.

2. We import it. Send us your export and we'll map it into Pet Friend's animal, adoption, and contact records so your history comes along.

3. Run in parallel. Keep your old system available while your team gets comfortable in Pet Friend, so there's no hard cutover and no gap in your records.

4. Go live. Once everything checks out, switch over fully. Your data stays yours, and you can export it again at any time.

Switching from Shelterluv or PetPoint?

Pet Friend includes a built-in migration importer: upload your Shelterluv AnimalInventory export and it's detected and mapped automatically — animals, statuses, microchips, intake history, and active foster placements included. PetPoint and other CSV exports get a guided column-mapping step with a full preview before anything is imported. If you're weighing your options now that PetPoint has moved into maintenance mode, you can be running on Pet Friend in an afternoon.

White-glove migration is free. Send us your export and we'll do the import for you, verify the counts together, and you keep read-only access to your old system while you parallel-run. Request migration help.

Weighing a specific product? See how Pet Friend stacks up as a Shelterluv alternative or an Animal Shelter Manager alternative.

Coming from another platform?

Shelters and rescues move to Pet Friend from paper, Excel, and legacy or enterprise shelter systems alike. If your current vendor is being discontinued, consolidated, or simply costs too much, we're happy to walk through what a move looks like for your organization. Contact us and we'll help you scope it.