How to switch from Motivity — programs, data and cutover

Why the program library is the hard part

An ABA agency’s program and goal library is years of clinical design: targets, prompt hierarchies, mastery criteria, phase conventions. Session history matters for audits; the library matters every single session from Monday morning onward. Budget the migration effort accordingly — the mapping week belongs to your clinical leads, not just the office manager.

Program structure is the part that needs mapping

Motivity migrations are usually straightforward on the client and staff side and interesting on the program side, because program libraries are structured differently in every system that has one.

Expect mapping rather than a screen-identical arrival. A goal that exists as one record in one system may be a goal with child targets in another; mastery criteria that were a dropdown in one may be free text in the other. None of that is destructive, but it is a decision per field rather than a checkbox, and it is better made deliberately during the export than discovered afterwards.

Budget roughly an afternoon of cleanup for a typical library rather than a services engagement, and do it with the person who built the library rather than the person who administers the software.

The mechanics of the import itself — the record types, the dry run, what arrives as documents — are the same for every source system and are covered in migrating practice management software.

What maps, and what does not

Maps as structured data: clients, guardians and authorizations with remaining unit balances; the program and goal library via CSV, mapped by your clinical leads so mastery criteria and phase logic survive the translation; and per-session data values, so graphs re-render from real numbers.

Arrives as documents: signed session notes and historical reports — the audit trail, attached per client.

Stays behind: Motivity’s live session streaming and its in-app claims history. Supervisors who relied on streaming move to scheduled overlap observations — plan that supervision pattern change before cutover, not after.

Cutover order

Freeze library edits a week out, map and import programs, verify a sample caseload with the BCBAs who own it, reconcile authorization balances against payer statements — then run Monday’s sessions in the new system. RBTs should see their Tuesday clients with the same programs, same targets, same phase. That is the test the migration passes or fails.

If the decision is not yet made, the Motivity comparison covers per-learner against per-seat pricing, which is the difference that usually decides it. The destination is ABA practice management software, and ABA billing covers what happens to units after the move.