Bring your customer list across

Before you start

Your book is the one thing you cannot re-key on a Sunday evening. Pressing Import adds customers at once, and there is no preview step on this path, so try a small file first. The import never merges two customers on its own, and it tells you what it added and what it left out.

You need to be an administrator. A dispatcher cannot open the page, because an import is the one action in the product that creates several thousand rows in a single press.

1. 1Export a CSV from whatever you are on now.Whatever it gives you is fine. You do not need to tidy it first, but every row needs a phone number (see below).
2. 2Open Customers, then Import.
3. 3Paste the file in and press Import.Each row that can be read is added as soon as you press it. Rows that cannot be read are listed back to you with their line numbers.

The column names do not have to match

Every CRM names these differently, and asking somebody to rename columns before their first import is a good way to lose them at the first step. These spellings are all recognized:

• The name — Name, Customer, Customer Name, Client, Full Name, or a First Name and Last Name pair, which is what Jobber, Service Autopilot and LMN all export. Both halves are kept; neither is quietly dropped.
• The phone — Phone, Phone Number, Mobile, Cell, Telephone, Primary Phone.
• The email — Email, Email Address.
• The address — Address, Street, Street Address, Address 1 or Service Address, with City or Town, State or Province, and Zip, Zip Code, Postal Code or Postcode.
• The rest — Company, Business or Organization; Nickname, Property Name, Site or Label for what you call the place; Notes or Comments.

The two things every row needs

A row with no name, or with no phone number that could be dialed, is refused, and its line number and the reason are given back to you. Everything else can be blank and filled in later. A name is what the rest of the record hangs on.

The phone number is required because it is how a customer is recognized when they sign in to their portal. A customer saved without one could never be invited, and nobody would find out until you tried. Ten digits is enough, and the usual punctuation is fine: (704) 555-0123 and 704.555.0123 both work. A phone made of letters, or too short to dial, is refused.

Duplicates are shown to you, never merged for you

A book that has been running for a decade has “Bob’s Lawn Care” and “Bob Lawn Care Co” in it, and “J. Smith” and “John Smith” at the same address.

The import scores likely matches on phone, email, name and address. On the pasted-CSV path, a row that looks like a customer you already have is skipped, not added and not merged, and the result lists it. If you have looked and they really are different people, tick “Import rows that look like customers I already have” and run the file again. You decide. An automatic merge is an automatic wrong merge eventually, and separating two customers who have grown a shared invoice history is not work anybody wants.

If you are coming off something old

One tidy CSV can be pasted straight in. A folder of exports out of ACT! — contacts in one file, notes in another, and a decade of history nobody has opened since 2019 — goes through the migration wizard on the same page instead. It reads the files, works out which is which, and puts the review in the middle rather than at the end.

After it has run

Every import leaves a report you can come back to: what was created, what was skipped, and the line number of anything that could not be read. If a file came in wrong, that report is the thing to send us. It says considerably more than a screenshot of the error does.

1. 1Open a handful of the imported customers.Check the addresses landed in the fields you expected.
2. 2Set up your crews, so there is somewhere to put the work.
3. 3Put one week on the board before you put a season on it.