Importing contacts

The contact importer brings your existing book of business into Traise from a CSV file. It’s a three-step wizard: upload, review, import.

Navigate to Admin → Import Contacts (/account/info/client-import).

Limits

Limit	Value
File size	5 MB maximum
Rows per import	5,000 maximum
Tags applied per import	50 maximum
File type	.csv only

If your list is larger than 5,000 rows, split it into several files and import them one at a time. There’s no limit on how many imports you can run.

Step 1 — Upload

1. Click Download Template to get a CSV with the expected columns. Starting from the template is the fastest path — but it isn’t required.
2. Drag your CSV onto the upload area, or click to browse.
3. Click Preview Import.

Column names are flexible

You do not have to match the template exactly. Column names are matched loosely, so First Name, firstname, and first_name all resolve to the same field. Your CSV does need a header row.

Recognized fields

Field	Example	Notes
First Name / Last Name / Company	John	At least one of these three is required
Phone / Mobile Phone	(555) 123-4567	Most formats accepted and normalized automatically
Email	john@example.com
Date of Birth	01/15/1985	MM/DD/YYYY or YYYY-MM-DD
Address / City / State / Zipcode	123 Main St	Standard address fields
Occupation / Employer Name	Agent
Smoker	Yes	Yes/No or True/False
Doctors / Rx	Dr Smith; Dr Jones	Separate multiple values with semicolons
Health fields		Network, Plan Name, Member Id, MBI, Medicaid, Monthly Premium
Secondary contact fields		Any field with a Co prefix — Co First Name, Co Phone, and so on
Managed By	jane@company.com	Matched against your users by email address or full name

Step 2 — Preview and validate

Every row is checked before anything is written. The summary at the top shows counts of valid, warnings, and errors, and each row is marked individually. Hover a row’s status icon to see exactly what was flagged.

Errors block a row

A row with an error cannot be imported. Its checkbox is disabled and it’s greyed out. Three things cause an error:

• No name at all — the row has none of First Name, Last Name, or Company.
• Malformed email — the value isn’t a valid email address.
• Unusable phone number — the value can’t be interpreted as a US phone number.

You can proceed and import the good rows, or fix your CSV and re-upload. Fixing and re-uploading is usually less work than reconciling later.

Warnings do not block a row

A warning row imports normally unless you deselect it. Three things cause a warning:

• Duplicate phone within this import — the same number appears on more than one row of your file.
• Phone already exists in Traise — a contact with that number is already in your account.
• Managed By didn’t match a user — the name or email in that column doesn’t correspond to anyone on your team.

Caution

Duplicate phone numbers are only warnings, which means importing anyway creates a second contact with the same number. Traise does not merge them for you. If you’re importing a list that overlaps with contacts you already have, review the warning rows and deselect the duplicates before importing.

Note

When Managed By doesn’t match a user, the row still imports — it just comes in unassigned. The name isn’t preserved anywhere, so you won’t be able to reconstruct the intended assignment afterward. Check your user emails before importing if assignment matters.

Options applied to the whole import

Below the row table are settings that apply to every contact in this import, not per row:

• Tag assignment — select tags to apply to all imported contacts. Up to 50. If you have no tags yet, create them in Tags admin first. Tagging an import is the easiest way to make it undoable later — you can find every contact from a bad import by its tag.
• Referral details — set “How did you hear about us?” and “Referred By” for the whole batch.

Select the rows you want, then click to import.

Step 3 — Results

The results screen shows how many contacts were imported and how many were skipped. From here you can start another import.

Tips

• Always tag your imports. A tag like import-2026-08-10 costs nothing and turns “we imported the wrong file” from a crisis into a filtered list.
• Do a 10-row test first. Cut your file down to a handful of rows, import it, and look at the result in Contacts. Column mapping problems are obvious after ten rows and expensive after five thousand.
• Phone formatting doesn’t need cleaning up in advance — parentheses, dashes, spaces, and leading +1 are all handled.
• The preview step never writes anything. You can upload, look at the validation results, and walk away with no changes made.