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Importing your clients and catalog

Bring what you already have in from a spreadsheet, in four steps, without renaming a single column first.

Both importers work the same way and live in the same place on their section: ClientsImport CSV and CatalogImport CSV. You can upload a CSV file or paste the rows straight in — whichever is faster than getting the file out of the other system.

Start from a sample

If you are building the file from scratch, start from ours. These are the same rows the Use a sample button loads inside the app, so they are guaranteed to match what the importer expects.

Clients sample (CSV)Company, address, and one contact per row.Catalog sample (CSV)SKU, price, cost, billing period and tax status.

How an import goes

  1. Step 1. Choose a file

    Upload a CSV, or paste the rows into the box. Up to 2,000 rows at a time.

  2. Step 2. Match the columns

    HootQuill reads your header row and guesses. It knows the spellings other systems actually use, so Company, Account Name, Organisation and Client all land on the client name, and Zip, Postcode and Postal Code all land on the ZIP.

    Check the guesses and fix any it got wrong. A column you do not want is left unmapped and ignored — you do not need to delete anything from the file first.

    3. The client importer with sample data loaded and each column matched to a field

    Step 2 with the sample loaded — every column here was matched from the header row.

  3. Step 3. Check the preview

    You see the actual rows as HootQuill has read them, before anything is written. Rows that cannot be imported are called out here — a client with no name, for instance — so you can fix the file rather than clean up afterwards.

  4. Step 4. Import

    Choose what should happen when a record with that name already exists:

    • Leave it alone — the existing record is untouched.
    • Fill in blanks from the file — empty fields on the existing record are filled in from the row.

    Either way, an empty column never overwrites something already there. Running an import twice does not blank out data you entered by hand in between.

When it finishes you get a count of what was created, updated and skipped, plus a line for anything that failed and why.

A note on the catalog file

Two columns are worth getting right, because the importer cannot tell when they are wrong:

  • Price is what you sell it for. Cost is what you pay. These are separate columns and a Cost heading will never be read as a price — otherwise a single import would invert every margin in your catalog. Cost is optional; leave it empty rather than putting a zero in, which would claim a 100% margin.
  • Billing is monthly, annual or one-time, and decides whether an item can recur on an agreement. Capitalisation does not matter.
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