Studio keeps three separate lists of organizations, and a file of company names could belong to any of them. They are not interchangeable: each one is wired to different parts of the product, and a client filed as a company will not appear on an invoice.
Which One Is Your File?
- Companies are organizations in your CRM. Where people work, who sponsors you, who you partner with. This is the list a person's employer field points at. Importing Companies.
- Clients are the organizations you do work for and send invoices to. They carry a plan, a retainer and monthly revenue, and projects and invoices both attach to them. Importing Clients.
- Vendors are the organizations that bill you. Suppliers, contractors, trades. Work orders and bills point at these. Importing Vendors.
A Quick Test
- Does money flow from them to you, against an invoice you raise? Client.
- Does money flow from you to them, against a bill they send? Vendor.
- Neither, and the reason it is in your database is that people are connected to it? Company.
The same business can legitimately sit in more than one list, if you both sell to them and buy from them. That is two rows in two lists, not a mistake.
What All Three Have in Common
- One row is one organization, not one contact. If your export has five rows for five people at the same firm, collapse them first or you will get five copies of the firm.
- All three dedupe on the organization name, ignoring case. Re-running a file updates what is there instead of doubling it.
- All three take a Contact Name and Contact Email pair. With both, that person becomes a real record in People and is linked to the organization, so when their email changes you change it once. With a name but no email the name is kept as plain text and nothing is linked, because a bare name is not enough to claim it means one specific human.
- Nothing you curated gets overwritten. If the organization already exists, the import only fills fields that are currently empty. A blank column in a spreadsheet is not a statement that the phone number you have is wrong.
- Revert removes only the organizations the import created. Ones that already existed and were filled in are left standing.
The Order to Do Them In
Companies before People. Clients before Projects and Invoices. Vendors before any bills you are bringing over. See What Order Should I Import In?.