Guide

Importing Clients

Bring your whole book across in one go — from Square, Vagaro, Booksy, or a spreadsheet you keep yourself. Match your columns, check the preview, import. Everything gets tagged, and anything can be undone.

Getting your file ready

Most booking software has an export. In Square: Customers → Directory → Import/Export → Export Customers. In Vagaro and Booksy: look for Export under your client or customer list. Anything that produces a .csv file will work.

You’ve almost certainly uploaded the spreadsheet itself rather than an exported copy. A .xlsx file isn’t a CSV even if you rename it.

Excel: File → Save As → CSV UTF-8 → save, then upload that file.Google Sheets: File → Download → Comma-separated values.Numbers: File → Export To → CSV.

Pick CSV UTF-8 where you get the choice — it’s what keeps accented names from turning into garbage.

Up to 2,000 rows and 5 MB per import, and five imports an hour. If your book is bigger than that, split the file and run it in a couple of passes — the duplicate check stops anyone landing twice.

Only a name — either a single full-name column, or separate first and last name columns. Everything else is optional: email, phone, Instagram, address, date of birth, company, tags, notes, and more.

We also keep the history from your old system — first visit, last visit, visit count and lifetime spend — on the client’s record under Before Creative Engine. Nothing is lost: any column you don’t map gets saved into the client’s notes under an Import dataline, so custom questions like “What’s your tattoo idea?” come across too. You can turn that off on the mapping step.

Running the import

Clients → Tools → Start an import. It’s available on the Artist plan and above.

We show each column from your file next to a dropdown of our fields, and take a first pass at matching them — “Email Address” finds Email, “Mobile” finds Phone. Check the guesses, fix any that are wrong, and set anything you don’t want to Ignore.

If your file has First Name and Last Name as separate columns, map both — we’ll join them. If it has one column holding “Smith, Robert”, tick Name column is Last, First and we’ll flip it.

Your file probably uses a different separator — semicolons are common on European exports. Change Separator on the file settings panel; if we spotted a better one we’ll say so and offer to switch. Same for the quote character and whether the first row is a header.

Because 03/04/1990 is either March 4th or April 3rd and there is no way to tell from the file. We won’t guess — a wrong guess means a wrong age on a client record — so you tell us which one your system wrote.

Very common in exports. On the mapping step, turn on Fix capitalisation on names under Text Cleanup — JOHN SMITH becomes John Smith. It leaves names that already look right completely alone, and it knows the awkward ones: O’Brien, McDonald, Mary-Jane, J. R. Smith. Every change is shown in the preview before anything is saved.

Ready — will import as-is.Warning — importing, but something looked odd (a malformed email, an unrecognised value). The row still lands.Duplicate — matches a client you already have. What happens depends on the option you pick above the table.Invalid — no name, so it can’t be imported. These are never sent.

Duplicates and repeat imports

Email first, then phone, then name — strongest signal first. It looks at both the clients you already have and repeats inside the file itself.

A matching phone number also has to have a matching name. Households and shop lines get shared, and we’d rather import someone twice than quietly skip a real client. So Mike Brooks still merges with Michael Brooks, but Patricia Brooks on the same number stays her own record.

Skip duplicates (default) — leave the existing client untouched.Update existing — fill in blanks on the client you already have. It will not replace details you’ve typed yourself unless you tick the overwrite box.Import anyway — create a second record regardless.

Tags are merged and notes are added, never replaced.

We warn you if you upload a file you’ve imported before. If it did run twice, the duplicate check will have skipped most of it — and you can undo either run from Import History.

After the import

Every imported client gets a tag — Imported 2026-07-24 by default, and you can change it to anything you like (“Square”, “Old Book”) before importing. Filter by that tag on the Clients page to see exactly that batch. It’s an ordinary tag, so remove it whenever you want.

Yes, in full. There’s an Undo this import button on the result screen, and older runs are listed under Clients → Tools → Import History. Undo removes the clients it created and puts back any fields it changed.

If you’ve edited one of those clients since importing, undo skips that one rather than wiping your work, and tells you which. Import records are kept for 90 days, so you can roll one back long after the fact.

Hit Download error report on the result screen. You get a CSV of only the rows that didn’t make it, with an _error column saying why. Fix those in your spreadsheet and import that smaller file.

Nothing leaves your browser until you press Import — the parsing and preview all happen on your machine, so an import you start and abandon is never uploaded at all. Once it runs, the file is stored for 7 days and then deleted automatically. The import record we keep afterwards holds counts and row numbers only, with none of your clients’ details in it.

You’re responsible for having the right to upload the details of the people in your file, and for how that data is used once it’s in your account. If a client asks you to remove their information, delete their record and it goes.