Switching trackers should not cost you your history
The single biggest reason people stay with a fieldwork tracking system they have outgrown is not loyalty. It is the months already sitting in it. When you have eleven months of logged hours, a folder of signed forms, and a supervisor who has countersigned every one of them, starting over somewhere else feels like volunteering to lose a year of your career.
You do not have to. ABA Fieldwork Tracker has a dedicated Import Hours screen for exactly this situation, and this guide walks through what it does, what it deliberately does not do, and how to bring a year of history in without misrepresenting a single hour.
It applies whether you are coming from a spreadsheet, a different tracking tool, or a paper folder. It applies to RBT ongoing supervision as well as BCBA and BCaBA fieldwork, because the import is workspace-aware and each track gets its own form.
Import is a monthly summary, not a file upload
This is the part worth understanding before you start, because it sets expectations for everything else. Import Hours is not a spreadsheet upload. You are not mapping columns or fixing a failed parse at eleven at night. There is no file involved at all.
Instead you add one summary per month, per organization. For each past month you enter the totals: how many hours fell into each BACB category, which organization the work happened at, and which supervisor oversaw it. That is the whole unit of import. One month, one workplace, one set of totals.
The reason it works this way is that a summary is what you can actually verify. Your signed monthly verification form already carries those totals, attested by both you and your supervisor. Re-entering them is a transcription you can check against a document. Reconstructing a year of individual sessions from memory is not, and a tracker that encouraged you to try would be manufacturing precision that never existed.
The form has a Save and add previous month action, which is a small thing that matters at volume. You work backwards month by month without returning to a list screen between each one. Eleven months is eleven passes through a short form, not eleven navigations.
What you need in front of you
Before you start, gather your signed monthly verification forms. For fieldwork these are your M-FVFs. If you have them as PDFs, open them side by side with the import screen. Everything the form asks for is on them.
For each fieldwork month you will enter the hours split across the categories the BACB tracks: independent unrestricted, independent restricted, supervised unrestricted, supervised restricted, and group supervision. If the difference between those categories is not fresh in your mind, the breakdown of restricted versus unrestricted hours covers it properly.
For an RBT month the shape is different, because the requirements are different. You enter service hours, supervision hours received, how many contacts were individual and how many were group, and how many observations occurred. Those are the figures the monthly compliance checks are built around.
You also need the organization and the supervisor for each month. If a past workplace or a former supervisor is not in your account yet, you can add either one inline without leaving the import screen. Past supervisors do not need an email address, which matters because you may be importing months overseen by someone you have not spoken to in two years and have no way to contact. You can always add their details later from the Supervisors page if you reconnect.
Three constraints, stated plainly
Every import feature involves tradeoffs. Here are ours, before you invest an evening in this rather than after.
Imported months count toward your total, but they cannot earn compliance awards. This is deliberate and it is enforced in the code, not just in policy. The compliance engine and the achievements checker read only months you logged in the app. An imported month is self-attested by definition, so it can raise your certification progress and it cannot unlock an award that is supposed to represent a month the system actually validated. There is a checkbox to record that a month met all BACB requirements as verified on your signed form, and that is exactly what it is: your attestation, stored as yours.
Imported months are summaries, so they are not in the CSV export. The export produces your logged sessions with their dates, times, and allotments. An imported month has no sessions to export, because you never entered any. It has a total. Expect your export to cover your ABA Fieldwork Tracker history, not your entire career.
Your existing signed forms remain the record of record. Importing a month does not regenerate its verification form and does not replace anything. The M-FVF you and your supervisor signed in March is still the document that proves March. Keep it. Both you and your supervisor are expected to retain signed supervision documentation for at least seven years, and an entry in any app is not a substitute for that.
What importing actually buys you
Given those constraints, it is fair to ask what the point is. The point is that your progress becomes true.
A certification target is a cumulative number. If you are 1,500 hours into a 2,000 hour requirement and your tracker only knows about the last 400, every screen it shows you is wrong in the same direction: it tells you that you have four times as far to go as you do. The progress bar is discouraging, the projected finish date is fiction, and the one number you actually want to look at is the one number you cannot trust.
Import fixes that in an evening. Once your history is in, your progress view reflects your whole journey rather than the portion that happens to postdate your switch. Your total hours and your unrestricted ratio are measured across your full fieldwork experience rather than month by month, so both are only meaningful once your earlier months are present.
From that point forward you are logging normally, month by month, with live checks running as you go. The imported history sits behind you as context, which is exactly what history is for.
How long this takes
Plan on two to four minutes per month once you have your forms open, so most people are done with a year in under an hour. The slowest part is not the app. It is finding the signed forms.
If you cannot locate a particular month’s documentation, the honest move is to leave that month out rather than estimate it. An imported month you cannot support with a document is a number you will have to defend later without one. A gap in your tracker is easier to explain than a figure you invented.
If you are mid-fieldwork and unsure how your past months are counted against your pathway’s requirements, the pathway requirement pages carry the sourced numbers for each certification and fieldwork type.
Where to start
Import Hours lives under Tools in the sidebar once you are registered. Registration is free, there is no card, and the import screen is available immediately, so you can test it with a single month before committing an evening to the whole backlog.
Start with your most recent complete month. It is the one whose paperwork is easiest to find and the one where you will most quickly notice if you have misread a column. Then work backwards with Save and add previous month until you run out of history or run out of documentation, whichever comes first.