Importing and Updating Companies

COMPANY IMPORT OVERVIEW

When importing companies, you are presented with two options:    

1. Create Companies
2. Update Companies

CREATE COMPANIES

When creating new companies, users can use any type of CSV they have and the headers can be of any kind, the same as with Contact Create. Once the user uploads the CSV file to the Spiro App, clicking on next gives a list of Spiro columns available for import. Spiro columns available for Company import are: 

Additionally to these default Spiro fields, users will be able to load custom fields created on the Company level as well as fields from Custom Section Entities on the Company that was defined for their organization. Custom Fields will be identified by their field label. Fields from Custom Section Entities will have their entity name before the field label. For example, if your organization had a Custom Section Entity called “Additional Information” with a called "Number of offices", the column header should appear as "Additional Information Number of offices" on your data import file. 

It is worth mentioning that the default fields will be named differently depending on the organization setup of display fields (renaming default Spiro columns).

Once the user does the mapping for all of the fields and continues, they will see the approximate amount of records that will be imported, and the import process can be started. 

In order to prevent duplication, Company import has one rule that it uses in order to find existing companies inside an organization. The rule is as follows:

• If the organization already has a company with the same name and same website as the CSV row that is trying to be imported, the row will be skipped and company data will not be updated with the contents from the CSV row. Also, company sections will not be updated. The combination of name + website must be unique - this means that if your data file has a company name that exactly matches one in Spiro, but the website value in Spiro and in your file are not the same, the data import would create a new company record. 

UPDATE COMPANIES

When updating companies, users cannot use just any CSV  - they must use the proper update CSV template provided by Spiro. The template can be downloaded during the data import process or by using the export feature in the Web UI. When you select Update Companies, you will see a screen which contains a list of companies that they usually see by clicking on Companies Tab in Spiro. In this screen, users can filter companies they want to update. Once they are satisfied with the filter results, they click export to download the filtered companies. The file has predefined column names and they should never be changed. All columns that are exported can be updated, except for the columns that in their name have (Read only) suffixed. 

Once the user opens the exported file, makes changes to the file and is satisfied with the changes, they upload the file to the Spiro Web Application. Notice how in the update companies job does not have a field mapping screen - this is because Spiro assumes that the user is using the file given by export feature and has not tempered with column names. Every change of column names will cause the field to be ignored during the update. Also, all columns added randomly will be ignored. 

Similar to contact update, a company update will update sections for the company, or create them if they don’t exist.