Switching to DiveDay
Moving your waivers off Smartwaiver
Smartwaiver holds signed waivers and the people who signed them, exportable as a participant CSV. Here's how to bring those people — and, when your file shows a waiver already accepted, that acceptance too — into DiveDay, where waivers are native and versioned against your own template going forward.
Smartwaiver does one thing — digital waivers — and some shops reach it because their booking system (DiveShop360 among them) outsources waivers to it. DiveDay's waivers are native and built into every tier, so moving off Smartwaiver means bringing the people across and telling DiveDay which of them already have a waiver on file.
The people migrate cleanly: a Smartwaiver participant export carries names, email, phone, and often an emergency contact — the roster you need. What it doesn't hold is certification cards or rental sizes; a waiver system isn't where those live, so expect most of the file to be contact data.
If a row in your export marks a diver's waiver as already accepted, DiveDay's importer trusts that and brings the waiver across too — marked imported, dated to the acceptance date in your file, and satisfying the boarding gate without asking the diver to sign again. It isn't a copy of the signed Smartwaiver PDF itself (that stays in Smartwaiver, or you can attach a saved copy of it during import); it's your prior acceptance, carried forward. The importer's preview shows exactly what will happen, row by row, before anything is saved. The scope table below states this plainly.
One rule we won't bend: you export your own participant CSV from your own Smartwaiver account. DiveDay never signs into Smartwaiver and never reaches across to pull your data — that's your data to hand us, not ours to take.
Step 1
Get your data out of Smartwaiver
Smartwaiver runs in a browser. The goal is a participant CSV — the people who signed your waivers. Menu labels shift over time, so treat these as the shape of the path, not word-for-word buttons.
- 1
Sign into your Smartwaiver dashboard
Exports live in the dashboard, behind your account login.
- 2
Open the waiver or participant search
Find the area that lists the people who have signed — usually a waivers or participants search with an export option.
- 3
Set the date range wide, then export to CSV
Set the range as broad as it goes — all time — so every participant is included, then export the list to CSV and save it where you'll find it.
- 4
That CSV is your roster
Names, email, phone, and any emergency contact you collected are what come across, along with whichever column in your export shows a waiver as already signed — if it has one.
- Smartwaiver holds waivers, not certification cards or gear sizes — so mostly it's the people who migrate, and that's the roster you need.
- Your column headings don't have to match anything. DiveDay recognizes the common names Smartwaiver and every other system use, and shows you exactly how each column mapped before you commit.
- A diver your file shows as already signed comes across marked imported, not asked to sign again — see the scope table below for exactly what that does and doesn't carry over.
Step 2
What comes across — and what doesn't
This is the same scope table DiveDay shows before it imports a single row. A card your system already checked comes across verified and flagged imported, ready to use, with a one-tap confirm for staff, and its refresher-due date comes with it. A specialty card is the one that waits on that confirm before it clears the dive it authorizes; individual medical answers are never reconstructed.
- Names, email, phoneComes acrossImported as given. A row with an email is matched to an existing diver so a re-import updates them; a row without one always comes in as a new record.
- Emergency contactComes acrossName and phone carry over when present.
- Dive insurance (DAN)Comes acrossCarried across as free text, exactly as your file holds it (“DAN #12345”). Never a gate — it's the detail the crew wants on hand in an incident.
- Rental sizesComes acrossBCD, wetsuit, boot, and fin sizes become a rental-fit profile.
- Certification cardComes acrossImported verified and flagged imported — DiveDay trusts the card your system already checked, so a diver is ready from the first trip. A card lands with a card number and a recognized level; staff give it a one-tap confirm. A refresher-due date comes across with it, read from whatever date format your file writes, and a date already past lands as a card that's due rather than one that looks current forever. Two things import for staff review instead of as verified: a card your own file marks unverified, and a card whose refresher date we can't read — we won't guess at a date the boat depends on. Unrecognized levels are left for a person to enter.
- Specialty cards (deep, wreck, night, drysuit)Comes acrossImported as verified specialty cards, flagged imported — from a specialty column, or from a certification row that names one (“PADI Deep Diver”). Your diver's agency number is what carries them, the same number their level card uses, so a “Deep, Wreck” cell comes across as both cards and a certification file with one row per card brings in every card a diver holds. A specialty is what clears a riskier dive, so this one is stricter than a level card: the dive that requires it waits until a staffer confirms they've seen the card, and everything else about the diver's day does not.
- Enriched air (nitrox)Comes acrossImported as a verified nitrox card, flagged imported, whenever the row carries a nitrox card number — so a diver can request enriched air right away. A fill is the highest-stakes gate, so an imported nitrox card gives plain air until a staffer confirms they've seen the card or checked the number with the agency; boarding never waits on it.
- Signed waivers & medical clearanceComes acrossWhen a row says the diver already accepted a waiver at the prior shop, DiveDay trusts it — including its medical clearance — and the diver is not asked to sign again. The record is marked imported everywhere staff see it, snapshots your shop's current release for reference only (the diver did not agree to that exact text), and is dated to the acceptance date the row gives (or the import date if it doesn't). Individual medical answers are never reconstructed — only the accept/no-review-needed outcome carries over. Trusting a prior shop's acceptance is a deliberate choice on our side, not an accident of the import.
- Waiver / medical documentsComes acrossA row's waiver_document_url / medical_document_url is fetched once and re-stored in DiveDay's own storage for audit, the same way a pasted card photo is. Image files (JPEG/PNG/WebP/HEIC) and PDFs are supported, 5 MB max.
- RoleComes acrossEveryone imports as a diver. Staff roles and logins are never granted by import.
- Card on file / paymentStays behindStays with your payment processor — DiveDay never imports card or payment data.
- Past visits (what they booked, when)Comes acrossA bookings or orders export comes across one line per booking, and lands on the diver's profile as history: the date, what your old system called the trip, its own status word, and the price it recorded. Two things it deliberately is not. It is not a trip — imported history never appears on your schedule, never counts toward a boat's capacity, and never reaches a manifest. And a booking is not a dive: an export holds cancellations and no-shows too, so DiveDay shows your old system's own word for each line rather than counting them all as dives the diver made. The amounts are there to read, not to add up — they stay out of your reporting, which covers what you've run here.
- Receipts & service historyStays behindPayment records stay with your processor, and gear-service history has nowhere to land — DiveDay tracks the sizes a diver takes, not individual rigs. Your full-shop export carries your DiveDay history when you want it.
Step 3
Bring the file into DiveDay
With your export saved, the rest is in DiveDay and takes minutes.
- 1
Open Settings → Import contacts
In your DiveDay shop, the owner or manager opens the import page and uploads the CSV you exported.
- 2
Check the preview
DiveDay maps your columns automatically and previews the file before anything is saved — how each column landed, which cards will come in verified and flagged imported, and anything it's leaving behind. Rows with an email match an existing diver so a re-import updates them instead of duplicating; the rows that pass import when you confirm.
- 3
Import — your roster is ready
Roster, rental sizes, and cards are ready immediately: cards land verified and flagged imported, so divers are trip-ready from the first booking. Each imported card carries a one-tap confirm on the diver's record for staff to give it a look when they get a moment — no boarding waits on it. The one thing that does wait is a dive that requires a specialty card: that gate opens when a staffer confirms the card, which is one tap on the diver's record.
For a Smartwaiver export: A Smartwaiver export is mostly contact data — expect people and emergency contacts to import, and no certification cards or rental sizes (a waiver system doesn't hold them). A waiver your export shows as already accepted comes across too, marked imported.
A person, not a wizard
We'll switch you on — and off — ourselves.
Send us what you've got — one clean export or a decade of messy tabs — and one of us maps the columns and brings your divers in with you, free, on any plan. And if DiveDay is ever not the right fit, the door swings the other way just as personally: your data is yours, and we'll help you carry all of it back out. Getting in, and getting out, shouldn't be the hard part.
Ready to make the move off Smartwaiver?
Walk the live demo as the owner, the captain, or a diver first — then start a trial shop, bring your export, and see your roster land in DiveDay with the safety spine intact.