Clients are the organizations you do work for. Projects attach to them, invoices are billed to them, and the client portal is scoped to them, so this is the file the whole agency side of Studio hangs off.
Before You Start
- One row per client, not per contact. If your export has a row for every person at every firm, collapse it first. Otherwise you get one client and the last contact wins, or worse, several near-identical clients.
- Import Clients before Projects and Invoices. Both of those will create a client from a name they do not recognize, but one created that way has only a name: no plan, no revenue, no contact.
- Coming from QuickBooks? Read Exporting from QuickBooks first. Its customer list has a few habits that need handling.
Running It
- Go to Imports → New Import and pick Clients.
- Upload your file, or start from the template at Imports → Templates.
- Check the mapping and run.
The Columns Worth Mapping
- Name is required, and it is the match key. Case is ignored, wording is not.
- Contact Email is the column that earns its keep. With it, the contact becomes a real person in People, linked to the client, and can be given portal access later. Without it the contact name is stored as plain text and nothing is linked.
- Address, City, State and Zip land on the contact's People record, not on the client. Clients hold no address of their own in Studio. A whole address in one cell is fine, Studio splits it.
- Plan, Monthly Revenue, Is Retainer and Retainer Hours describe the engagement. Monthly Revenue wants the number on its own, no dollar sign needed.
- Status takes active, inactive, paused or lead. A prospect list should come in as lead.
Three Things the Importer Does on Purpose
- A contact whose name is the company name is ignored. Accounting exports repeat the customer's own name in the contact column when no contact is set. Taken literally that creates a human named after the business, and every one of them turns up in the duplicates tool later. An echo is not a contact.
- Several addresses in one cell are sorted, not split at the first comma. A cell reading “anthony@…, blake@…, info@…” against a contact called Blake will file Blake under Blake's address, not Anthony's, and it knows info@ belongs to the company rather than a third colleague.
- Placeholder customers are skipped. A row whose name is “.” or a report footer is not a client, and it is reported as skipped rather than created.
Re-Running the File
Safe. Matching is on the client name, so a second run updates rather than duplicates, and it only fills fields that are currently blank.
Clients That Arrive Incomplete
A client with no email, or an email with no name, is held on the Needs Info page instead of joining the list. This is deliberate: a customer export usually contains a row for every payer you ever categorised a deposit against, and those are not clients. Complete the real ones, and press Keep as-is on any that are genuinely fine without an email address, such as the ones you invoice by post. That choice is remembered across future imports.
Held clients still count for nothing against your plan's client cap, and they stay reachable from anything that already links to them.
After It Runs
- Import Projects and Invoices next. Both match on the client name you just imported.
- Check the duplicates step on your next people-bearing import. A client contact under a work address and the same human in People under a personal address will be offered for merging.