Importing contacts

Contacts (customers, leads, suppliers, people you work with outside of your company) are an essential part of your business. All sales and purchases (but also projects and activities) are connected to specific contacts. Instead of adding contacts to Scoro one by one, you can import your existing contact base and save time on manual work.

Go to the Import/Export module in Scoro and open either the tab People or Companies, depending on which of them you wish to import. Companies and people have to be imported separately. People can be the contact person of a company or a private person you are working with (client/lead/partner/supplier in B2C). If you wish to import both people and companies, we recommend starting with companies. You can then define in the import file for people which company each person represents or is linked to.

Invest your time in cleaning up the data before importing it (remove duplicates and outdated information, fix email addresses and other details). Accurate data boosts the overall productivity, but more importantly helps to avoid errors and get more detailed reporting.

TIPS:

• Download the example file and follow its structure. You can find the example file by going to the Import/Export module and selecting the relevant import page. Alternatively, you can fill out one company/person card in Scoro and export it to understand exactly what columns need to be filled out. 
  
• Insert the data about each contact on a separate row in the file.
• The mandatory field that needs to be filled in for importing companies: company name
• The mandatory field that needs to be filled in for importing people: either person first or last name
• If you wish to tag your contacts to segment and filter your customer base even better, you need to predefine the same tags in Scoro before importing contacts. Read more about tags.
  
• You can add the category of the contact straight to the import file – a new category will be added to Scoro, it doesn't have to be predefined. Read more about categories.
• You can have several tags, phone numbers, mobile numbers and emails for each company/person. Separate the values with vertical bars (e.g. Tag1|Tag2|Tag3).
  If you wish to add an Account Manager (Company_manager) to the company/person, this employee must already have a user account in Scoro. Add your employee’s first and last name to the company_manager column (exactly like written on their Scoro user profile). The same applies to Related users. If you don’t add an Account Manager to the company, the company shows up in Scoro’s contact list as “Without contact manager”.
• If you wish to define that a person represents a company, add this relationto the people file (column related_company_name). That company has to exist already in Scoro. It is also possible to add relations to the company file (related_person_name), in that case, the person must already exist in Scoro.
• You can import clients as well as suppliers or actually any other companies (e.g. competitors, partners). If you want a company to be marked as a client in Scoro, enter 1 to the field company_is_client. Mark 0 if they are not a client. The same goes for suppliers (fill in the is_supplier field).
• If you add a country to the company/person, the country name must match the predefined country names in Scoro. You can open the contact card in Scoro and check the list of countries just to be sure.
• If you need to add specific information about your contacts but the fields for tags, categories (or any other) aren't suitable for that, you can create custom fields in Scoro. After you have created a custom field for companies/people, this information can be imported. Just add an additional column to the file.
• Delete all columns you do not need before the import.

After you have prepared the file, import it to Scoro.

Now to the mapping phase. Map the columns you filled out in Excel to the fields in Scoro. If you have used the column headers from the template file, most fields are mapped automatically.

You can either update existing items or add new ones. If you are importing new companies/people (or just doing the very first import), untick the “Update already existing items” box.

• Update already existing items – if the import file contains new data about contacts that already exist in Scoro, the contacts are updated. If this option is unticked, the new data is ignored.
• Match fields by – in case of frequent importing you are able to choose by which fields the information in the import file and the existing contacts in Scoro are matched. This functionality will help you avoid duplicates in your contact base. If the name and ID code are chosen, for example, then contacts with similar names and ID codes are searched for. If duplicates are found, you are able to determine, one by one, how they are handled – if they are ignored, added as a new contact or the information is added to the existing one in Scoro.
• Save matched column headers as default – if the checkbox is ticked and the “Import” button is clicked, the column header names in the import file are saved, so the next time you import a similar file, the system will match the values automatically. 

!Important note for updating contacts: If you update existing contact cards via import and your contacts have multiple addresses, please keep in mind that currently importing contacts, you can add/update only one address. For example, if you export your contacts, the file will include only the main address, and once you update the file and import it back, you will overwrite the information, and your contacts will have only one address. 

Scoro will notify you once the import is complete. If any of the lines contained errors, the lines with errors are not imported. You will get an error report indicating what the issues were. Just download the file, make corrections in there and import it again.