Before you can begin uploading your data into BuddyCRM, there are a few best practices to ensure that your CSV file upload will work smoothly and without hassle:
- Remove commas and single quotation marks: CSV files don’t like commas or single quotation marks. Like at all. The quickest and easiest way to replace these quickly would be to use the ‘find & replace’ tool in Word or Google Doc to change any instances of , or ‘ to a space.
- Ensure all mandatory fields are completed: some fields like a phone number or email address are perfectly acceptable to be left blank. However any mandatory fields need to have something entered, or this will cause records to be rejected from import.
- Dropdown option matching: where a field is a dropdown selection within BuddyCRM (like country or title), you need to ensure that the value entered on your CSV exactly matches the created options in BuddyCRM (or that any new dropdown values that you need have been added ahead of the import). For example if your country option in BuddyCRM is ‘UK’, but on your CSV you have entered ‘United Kingdom’, then this will cause a problem upon importing the CSV file, as ‘United Kingdom’ isn’t a valid option created within your BuddyCRM. You can use ‘find & replace’ to quickly change any incorrectly-typed option in your CSV to the correct wording.
- Paste special: Occasionally, there can be formatting in your data that may not be visible to the naked eye, but causes problems for BuddyCRM. It is good practice to copy all the cells you have data in, open a brand new sheet and do ‘Paste Special – Values Only’. This will copy only the values and no formatting in.
- UTF-8 CSV file format: For formatting reasons behind the scenes, BuddyCRM can only accept ‘UTF-8’ formatted CSV files. The best practice is to open the CSV on your computer, use ‘save as’ and select ‘CSV UTF-8’ as the file format.
You can find our guides to importing into the different areas of BuddyCRM below:
Of course if you experience any issues, don’t hesitate to get in touch with the BuddyCRM support team who will be delighted to help and assist, at support@buddycrm.com.