Bringing your data across

If you are coming from another system, or from a spreadsheet you have kept for years, you do not have to retype it. Settings → Import your data takes a CSV file and creates your workers or your families from it.

We will also do this for you. If the file is awkward, send it over and we will sort it out rather than leaving you to it.

What it can bring in

Workers and families. Not bookings and not invoices, on purpose: a booking imported wrongly is a visit nobody turns up to, and that is not a mistake worth risking to save an afternoon of typing.

For either one, the columns it can use are:

• Full name and email, which are the two it has to have
• Phone
• Address, town or city, postcode
• Notes
• For workers only: hourly rate and years of experience

Your columns can be called anything. You match them up on the next screen.

Why email is needed

It is how we tell whether somebody is already on your books. Without it, running the same file twice would create everybody twice, and the first thing most people do is run the import again because they were not sure the first one worked.

It also means the person can sign in later. Nobody is given a password: they set their own from a link, which is also what proves the address is real.

The preview

After you pick the file you get a screen with two halves.

The top half is the matching up. We guess it from your column names and get it right most of the time, but check it. Each column shows an example from your own file next to its name, so you can see at a glance that "Contact" is the email and not the phone number.

The bottom half is what it is going to do, counted three ways:

• Will be added. New people.
• Already here, or elsewhere. Skipped. Either they are already on your books, or that email address signs in to a different agency, which we will never move.
• Cannot be read. Something is wrong with the row. A missing name, an email that is not an email.

Underneath that are the first ten rows as they would be created.

Nothing is written until you press the button. The preview and the import are the same piece of code, and the only difference is whether it saves, so what you saw is what you get.

When some rows do not go in

You get a report, and the report is the point. It names the row number as your spreadsheet shows it, who was on it, and what was wrong.

Fix those rows in your own file and import it again. Everybody already added is skipped the second time, so you will not end up with two of anyone.

A bad row only costs you that row. Four hundred good rows go in around it.

Money columns

An hourly rate can be written the way you would write it. 18.50, £18.50, 18,50 and 1,234 all come out as the right number. Anything that is not a digit is ignored.

A note on what we keep

The file sits on our server between the moment you upload it and the moment you import, and then it is deleted. If you walk away at the preview screen it is deleted within six hours. It holds your whole contact list, so it does not sit around.