Importing customers and leads

Bringing customers, contacts or leads in from a spreadsheet, rather than adding them one at a time.

When you would use this: moving from another system, or loading a list somebody handed you.

Steps: from Setup, choose Import, pick the kind of record, and upload a CSV. You are shown the columns found in your file and asked to match each one to a field on the record — name, email, and so on — with a preview of a few rows before anything is written.

What each option means: matching a column to "do not import" leaves that data out entirely. Where a customer or contact might already exist (matched by name or email), you choose whether a matching row updates the existing record or is skipped, so a re-run of the same file does not create duplicates.

What happens next: the import runs as a job you can watch progress on; when it finishes you are shown how many rows were created, updated, and skipped, with reasons for anything that failed. Every row the import creates is marked as having come from it, which is what makes it possible to undo — removing only the rows that import added, never one your firm already had before it ran.

When it refuses: a file with no recognisable header row, or one over the size the importer accepts, is refused before anything is read. A row that fails validation (a malformed email, a required field left blank) is skipped and listed, not silently dropped.

Who can do this: importing is an Owner or Admin action at every firm — it is not offered to other roles, whatever else they can do with customers or leads.