Import customers from CSV or Excel

Instead of adding customers one at a time, you can create many at once from a spreadsheet. octoja reads a CSV or Excel file, lets you match its columns to customer fields, and creates the matching customers in a single step.

The file is parsed in your browser and is never uploaded — only the rows you map are sent to octoja.

Before you start

You need the Customer Management permission, and your group must be set to Access to all customers — for a group limited to selected customers, the Import Customers entry does not appear. Have your spreadsheet ready as a .csv or .xlsx file. A single import handles up to 1000 rows; split larger lists into several files.

Steps

1. Click Customers in the left sidebar.
2. Open the Actions menu (the ... button) in the top right of the page header.
3. Choose Import Customers.
4. Drop your file onto the dialog, or click to choose a .csv or .xlsx file.
5. Check that First row contains headers matches your file. When it is on, octoja treats the first row as column titles and auto-maps columns whose headers it recognises.
6. Review the column mapping. For each customer field, pick which spreadsheet column it should read from, or leave it as — Ignore —. Name is the only required field, so a column must be mapped to it before you can continue.
7. Check the preview of the first five rows, then click the import button — it names how many customers it will create.

When the import finishes, octoja shows a summary — for example "5 created, 2 skipped." — and lists any skipped rows with the reason they were skipped.

Customer fields

You can map your columns to the following fields. Only Name is required; map any others that your spreadsheet contains.

Tips and notes

• Headers are matched automatically. If your column titles use common names (such as Name, Company, Reference, Street, City, Email, or Phone), octoja maps them for you. You can always adjust the mapping by hand.
• Rows without a name are skipped. Any row whose Name is blank is left out of the import and appears in the skipped list.
• Duplicates are skipped. A row is skipped when its name already matches an existing customer, ignoring upper- and lower-case differences and any spaces around the name. A name that appears several times in the same file is created once; the later rows are skipped the same way.
• Address and contact details are optional. octoja stores only the parts you map, so a file of names alone works fine.
• To export your existing customers as a spreadsheet, use Export CSV in the More actions (...) menu of the customer list itself, next to the search box — not the Actions menu in the page header.