A practical checklist for bringing decades of club cricket history online: what a genuine historical import should include, and the questions worth asking before you commit.
Clubs looking to merge decades of history with PlayHQ, or Play-Cricket in the UK, tend to run into the same handful of questions before they commit to a platform. Here is what is actually worth checking.
Some cricket-stats platforms treat a historical import as a separate project: a quote, an invoice, and a wait while someone on their end works through your archive. Others build it into the subscription, so bringing your history across costs nothing beyond what you are already paying. Ask which one you are looking at before you send anything over.
A migration done by hand, spreadsheet by spreadsheet, can run to days. An automated import, done properly, should be closer to an hour once your data is handed over. If a platform cannot tell you roughly how long its own import takes, that is worth noting.
Most clubs do not have one clean spreadsheet. They have several, built up by different people over different eras, and some have nothing but old scorebooks that were never typed up at all. A platform that only accepts a specific CSV format is going to leave a chunk of a club's history behind. BetterCricket's scorecard reader takes a scanned or photographed handwritten scorebook and extracts the batting, bowling and fielding figures directly, on top of the usual spreadsheet and CSV imports.
An import is only half the job. The other half is what happens to next Saturday's game. Look for a platform that keeps pulling from PlayHQ or Play-Cricket automatically after the initial import, rather than one that leaves you back to manual updates the moment the migration is done.
Once the data is in, it is worth asking what it becomes. A static archive page is one thing. A full public club website, with player profiles, leaderboards, all-time records and a season yearbook built from the same reconciled data, is another.
The historical import is included in every plan, whatever shape a club's records are in. Setup is typically under an hour. The scorecard reader handles old scorebooks as well as spreadsheets. Once your history is in, it keeps syncing automatically with PlayHQ or Play-Cricket, and the same data runs your public website, leaderboards, yearbooks, team selection, fees and opposition analysis.
100 years of club history, sitting in one spreadsheet · BetterCricket features · Pricing · The modules · PlayHQ
BetterCricket includes the historical import in every plan, whatever shape your old records are in. Search for your club at betterat.cricket/trial and we'll handle the first full historical sync. Learn more
A genuine import should read whatever a club actually has, spreadsheets, CSV exports, even scanned scorebooks, reconcile it against live PlayHQ or Play-Cricket data, and be included in the subscription rather than billed as a separate migration project.
A well-built automated import typically takes under an hour once the data is handed over. A manual, spreadsheet-by-spreadsheet migration can run to several days.
Not all of them. BetterCricket's scorecard reader can take a scanned or photographed handwritten scorebook and extract the batting, bowling and fielding figures directly, alongside ordinary CSV and spreadsheet imports.
No. The historical import is included in the annual plan, with no separate migration fee, whatever shape the club's records are in.