One row is one note, and each lands dated on a person's timeline. This is the file that carries years of context you would otherwise leave behind: who visited whom, what was said, what was promised.
What a Row Needs
The note text, plus one way to identify the person: their ID in your old system, their email, or their full name.
Import People First. This One Is Not Optional.
A note that matches nobody is skipped and reported. It is never attached to a blank person, and it never invents one, because a note against the wrong person is worse than a note you have to import again. Run your People file first, ideally with the old system's ID column mapped, and the match rate goes to near enough everything.
Running It
- Go to Imports → New Import and pick Notes.
- Upload your file, or start from the template at Imports → Templates.
- Check the mapping and run.
The Columns Worth Mapping
- Person's ID in your old system is the strongest match there is, and it is the reason to map the same column on your People import.
- Note Date. Skip it and every note lands with today's date, which turns a decade of pastoral history into one very confusing afternoon. This is the single most important optional column in the file.
- Note Type shows as a tag: call, email, visit, meeting.
- Note Author is the staff member who logged it, shown as a tag on the note.
Confidential Notes
Everything imported here is visible to anyone who can see the person's profile. If your old system had a private or counselling-only note type, filter those rows out of the file before you import, and bring them across another way. An import is not the place to make an access-control decision.
After It Runs
- Download the error report for any rows that were skipped. The reason is almost always a person who was not matched, which you can fix by importing that person and running the notes file again.
- Open one busy person's profile and read their timeline top to bottom. If everything is dated today, your Note Date column was not mapped: revert and run it again.