Import your church from a spreadsheet

People › Everyone › Import a spreadsheet (or Import › Your church from a spreadsheet). Owners, admins and People Managers. Five steps on one page, and nothing is written until the last one.

1. Upload

A CSV or Excel file, up to 20 MB and 10,000 rows, with the column names in the first row. Exports from Planning Center, Breeze, ChurchTrac and Tithe.ly are recognized by their own column names.

2. Match the columns

One row per column: a sample value, what it looks like, and where it goes. Known exports are matched without AI. For the church's own sheet, the column names and the *shapes* of the first rows (an email as x@x.xx, digits as 9s, never the real values) are read once by AI, and its proposals are marked with a spark; check the ones in amber. A column can go to a church field, a new church field named after the column, or a private note (allergies, medical, custody, which need two-step sign-in on). "Remember this matching" keeps it for next month's sheet.

3. Read the rows

Each row is checked (emails, phones, dates, grades) and matched against the people already here: the same id as last time, then the same email or phone *with* the same last name, then the same name and birthday. A name alone never matches.

Families are found by rule: a household id column when the file has one; otherwise adults who share a street and a last name are one household, and a child joins the adults at their street. A child with no adult at their address is listed in the review.

4. Review

Five counts (new, already here and updated, households, on the team, rows that need a look), then the rows that need a look grouped by problem, each with a fix that applies to every row like it: treat "Member" as one of your statuses or make a new one, import without a phone that can't be read, choose adults for children, skip rows. Under that, the lines said before anything is written: the people limit, the seats for team rows, the protected columns, and the switch for people already here.

"Download what will happen" gives a spreadsheet of the review, one line per row, for the church office.

5. Write

Five hundred people a request with a counter. A closed tab or a dropped connection loses nothing: come back to Import and press Continue. Done says what happened, and offers Possible duplicates, Tidy-up, and Invite the team.

• Nobody is invited or emailed. A Team column puts people on the team as musicians (a file never makes owners or admins); invite them afterwards from Team › Invite the team, 25 at a time.
• One line goes in the activity log: who imported how many, from which file.
• Undo for 24 hours hides the people the import made (restorable for 30 days), gives updated people their earlier values back, and removes the team spots and empty households it made.
• Run the same file again and it updates rather than duplicates.