Vagaro is salon software. Plenty of tattoo shops run on it anyway, usually because it was cheap and the front desk already knew it from a previous job. It handles the calendar fine. Where it chafes is everything tattoo-specific — a sleeve doesn't fit into "services," the membership and package features sit there unused, and there's nowhere for the stuff you actually need to remember between sessions.
If you've decided to leave, here's the whole move, in order. The export details below match Vagaro's own docs as of mid-2026; if a menu has moved by the time you read this, their support article on exporting the customer list is the thing to search for.
1. Get your customer list out
A few Vagaro-specific quirks to know before you start clicking:
Only the business owner can export. Not managers, not the front desk login. If you're an artist renting a chair in someone else's Vagaro shop, you'll need the owner to run the export for you — more on that in a second.
The path: on a computer, go to Reports → Customers, apply any filters you want, then hit Export in the bottom-right and pick Excel. On the phone app it's More → Reports → Customers, then the three-dot Action menu. Skip the PDF option; a PDF of your client list is a decoration, not data.
It exports as an Excel file, not a CSV. Most import tools want CSV. Open the .xlsx in Excel or Google Sheets and do File → Save As (or Download As) → CSV. Thirty seconds, but it catches people.
Filters affect the export. Whatever's filtered on screen is what lands in the file. Handy when you want it — see next point — but check you haven't left a filter on before exporting your "full" list.
If you're an artist leaving a shop and only want your clients: the owner can filter the report by employee before exporting, which gives you just the people who booked with you. One catch from Vagaro's own docs — that filter matches people who booked with you. A client who only ever bought a gift card or product through you won't show up in it.
2. Know what's staying behind
Same story as leaving any booking platform, with a couple of Vagaro-specific ones:
- Appointment history doesn't ride along with the customer export. You can run and save other reports as an archive, but don't expect your new system to import years of past bookings. Most can't, and honestly, most shops never look at them again.
- Memberships and packages — if you sold any, wind them down before you leave. Figure out who has unused sessions on a package and either honor them manually after the switch or finish them out before. This is the piece that actually burns people, because the customer file won't warn you.
- Stored cards stay with Vagaro's payment processing, always. Clients re-enter cards wherever you take money next.
- Customer notes may or may not be in the export depending on where they were entered. Open the file and look before you cancel anything.
3. Clean the sheet
With the CSV open: merge or confirm the name columns, sort by email and squash the duplicates, and delete anyone you genuinely wouldn't contact again. Old no-shows and one-time gift card buyers don't need to move to the new place. This usually takes ten or fifteen minutes and it's the difference between starting fresh and starting with a junk drawer.
4. Import, and test the import first
Whatever you're moving to, make a five-row test file and import it twice before you touch the real list. You're checking one thing: that duplicates get skipped, not doubled. If the tool can't pass that test, find out why before feeding it 800 clients.
(If you're moving to Stencil: Clients → Import CSV. It reads Vagaro-style headers, lets you fix any column it guessed wrong, and skips rows whose email already exists — so re-running an import is safe.)
5. The overlap week
Don't cancel Vagaro the day you import. Run one week where all new bookings go into the new system and Vagaro just sits there as a reference. When a week passes without needing to look something up in it — export a final copy of everything as an archive, save it with your backups, and close the account. Watch for the subscription renewal date so you're not paying for a ghost month.
The short version
- Owner exports Reports → Customers → Excel (filter by employee if you only want your own clients)
- Convert .xlsx to CSV
- Settle open packages/memberships — this one's manual and it's on you
- Clean: names, dupes, dead rows
- Test-import 5 rows twice, then run the real thing
- One week of overlap, final archive export, cancel before renewal