Onboarding: Import Contacts

Overview

Importing lets you bring an existing customer list — from a spreadsheet, another CRM export, or your email contacts — into OnePilot's CRM all at once, instead of adding people one at a time.

Why it exists

Most businesses switching to OnePilot already have customers somewhere else. This step exists so you don't lose that history or have to rebuild it manually — your existing relationships come with you.

Benefits

• Supports standard spreadsheet formats, so exports from almost any previous system can be prepared for import.
• Column mapping lets you match your file's headers to OnePilot's fields, even if the naming is different.
• Detects likely duplicates during import so you don't end up with two records for the same person.

Step-by-step guide

1. Export your existing contacts to a spreadsheet file if they aren't already in one.
2. Go to CRM → Contacts → Import and upload the file.
3. Map each column in your file to the matching OnePilot field (name, email, phone, company, tags).
4. Review the duplicate-detection summary before confirming.
5. Confirm the import — contacts appear in your CRM immediately.

Tips

• Clean up obvious issues (blank rows, clearly invalid emails) in your spreadsheet before importing — it's much faster than fixing records afterward.
• Add a tag during import (like "imported-2026") so you can easily find and review this batch later.

Best Practices

• Do a small test import (10-20 rows) first if you're importing a very large list, to confirm the column mapping is correct before running the full import.

Common Mistakes

• Skipping the duplicate review step. It's the easiest point to catch and merge duplicates — much harder to clean up after thousands of contacts are already in.
• Mapping the wrong column to email or phone. Double-check the mapping preview before confirming; a swapped column is the most common import mistake.

Troubleshooting

If an import fails partway through, check the error summary for the specific rows that failed — usually a formatting issue in just a few rows rather than the whole file.

Frequently Asked Questions

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