Almost every business arrives with a spreadsheet. Import reads it, matches your columns to fields, and tells you exactly what it is about to do before it does anything.
Steps
- Open the list you want to import into — Customers, Leads, Items, Vendors, Employees or Projects.
- Choose Import CSV.
- Either choose a file or paste rows straight from a spreadsheet. The first row must be the header.
- Match each column to a field. Anything matching by name is matched for you; set the rest, or mark them not to import.
- Required fields are marked. The import will not run until they are matched.
- Choose what happens when a record already exists: skip it, update it, or stop and report.
- Import. You get back how many were added, updated and skipped — and any failed rows with the row number and the reason.
Nothing is written until every row has been checked. A mistake in the last row does not leave half an import behind.
Importing documents
Quotations, orders and invoices work differently, because a document is a header plus its lines. Put one row per line item and repeat the document number down the page — rows sharing a number become the lines of one document. A file with no number column is read as one document per row.
Imported documents arrive as drafts. Nothing is e-mailed, no stock moves and nothing is filed until you look at them.
What will catch you out
- Dates are read as dd/mm/yyyy first, which is what a spreadsheet here gives you.
- A customer on a document row must already exist — matched on name, code or e-mail.
- Update mode refuses any document past draft, so a spreadsheet cannot rewrite an invoice you have already sent.
Something missing or wrong here? Tell us — a question that needed asking usually means a page that needed writing.