Available to Admins or Authorized Users
You can upload contacts to your Onpipeline account directly from a file on your hard drive.
The file must be a CSV:
- UTF-8 file encoding
- .csv file name extension
- fields delimited with comma or semicolon
How can I import my contacts from Excel?
In order to upload just go to Settings / Import contacts
It is important to know that contacts in CRM start from people, therefore organizations will be created automatically if in the relevant column of a person’s record. It is not possible to import organizations without a contact person.
Sample records:
Default Record (12 fields):
- First Name *
- Family Name *
- Full Name (this is the display name – typically composed by first name and last name)
- Phone
- Email *
- Organization (Name) *
- Address
- Apt./Floor
- City
- Postcode
- State
- Country
- + Custom fields
If your file includes fields that are not present by default in Onpipeline, the custom fields must be created before importing.
If your CSV includes multiple email addresses, please note that only one email can be imported into the Email field. We recommend using the primary email and storing any additional addresses in a separate custom field.
(*) Fields used to check duplicates
Sample data
If you download your sample data (recommended)
You will notice that the sequence of your fields is as follows:
- Person fields
- Person custom fields (if any)
- Organization fields
- Organization custom fields (if any)
Always fill in person’s fields
- First Name
- Family Name
Full Name can be left blank because it is generated automatically when empty.
Other fields can be left blank, although email is recommended for better duplicate detection
Same number of fields
Important! Your CSV file must include the same number of fields you have in Onpipeline (see required fields above). If you upload less fields your will see an error message. Additional fields (columns) can be removed before or while mapping.
With the exception of the * Name fields that are required, fill in fields that are relevant or leave them empty (i.e. a person may have a record with no values in the organization field). Please notice that empty means empty, with no spaces.
All fields must be there regardless their value.
B2C Customers?
You will probably need to add some custom fields to the person database for the customer address. Alternatively, you can switch to a salesforce scheme and rename organizations to accounts, and use the address of the organization (account).
Uploading a file
Once you upload a valid file you will see something like this. It’s important that you notice that there is a delimiter selector. If you data is not correct you may need to change the delimiter.
If data looks good you will be able to map each column to the corresponding destination field on Onpipeline.
Field mapping
When importing your file, you will need to match each column from your CSV to the corresponding field in Onpipeline.
Here are some common mappings:
First Name → First Name
Last Name → Family Name
Email → Email
Phone → Phone
Company → Organization
Address → Address
City → City
⚠️ Organization matching
When importing contacts into Onpipeline, the system can automatically create and link Organizations based on the “Organization” (or “Company”) field in your file.
If multiple contacts share the exact same organization name, they will be linked to the same Organization record. However, Onpipeline does not automatically detect similar or duplicate organization names. This means that small differences (e.g., “Smith Ltd” vs “Smith Limited” or “Smith Ltd (London)”) will result in separate Organization records. Each organization is considered by its Name and Postcode. This means that “Company” with postcode “12345” an “Company” with postcode “79789” are different organizations.
Video:
Duplicates
Once you have mapped all the column you can have a preview of the imported data and decide how to handle duplicates. We consider a duplicate the same name+email in case of persons (1), and name+postcode in case of organizations (2).
(1) Name includes both first name and last name.
(2 ) If you upload the same organization+postcode with different persons, just one organization record will be considered.
- Skip – We will import only new records.
- Merge – Contact will be filled with information from your CSV if the local field is empty.
- Replace – This will entirely replace records with the new records from your CSV.
Import log will be generated. Each import can be reverted within 7 days.
Info about the CSV standard: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180#page-2