Import your people

Bring everyone in from a spreadsheet or your old church system. Match your columns, check the file first, keep families together, and undo if needed.

If your people already live in a spreadsheet or another church system, you don't need to type them in one by one. Phyle reads a CSV file, keeps families together, and lets you check everything before a single record is saved. Administrators and staff can import.

Get your file ready

Phyle imports CSV files up to 10 MB. Almost every church system and spreadsheet can save one.

Planning Center: in People, export your people as CSV. Phyle recognizes the file and matches every column for you, households included.
Breeze: in People, export everyone as CSV. Phyle recognizes this file too, family roles included.
ACS, Fellowship One or another system: look for an export of individuals or people, and choose CSV. Include family or household details if the export offers them.
Excel or Numbers: choose Save as and pick CSV.
Google Sheets: choose File › Download › Comma-separated values.

Moving your whole church over? See Switching from Planning Center or Switching from Breeze for what comes across and what's included.

Starting from scratch? Go to People › Import and select Download a template spreadsheet. It has every heading Phyle recognizes and one example row. Fill it in, save it as CSV, and every column lines up on its own.

Put one person on each row, with a heading row at the top. Include a family ID or household name if your old system has one; it's the surest way to keep families together. Bigger than 10 MB? Split the file and import the parts one after another.

Upload and match your columns

Go to People › Import (or People, then More › Import from a spreadsheet).
Select Choose a CSV file, pick your file, and select Continue.
On Match your columns, check each row of the table. Column in your file shows your heading, Example shows a value or two from your file, and Goes into is the Phyle field it will fill.

If your file is a Planning Center or Breeze export, the top of the page says so, for example Detected: Planning Center export, and every column is matched the way that system names it. Phyle tells them apart by their headings. If it guessed wrong, or you'd rather match the columns yourself, change Read the file as.

For any other file, Phyle fills in Goes into for headings it recognizes, such as "First name", "Surname", "Cell phone", "DOB", "Zip" or "Family ID". A column with the same name as one of your custom fields (Settings › Custom fields) fills that field. For anything it doesn't recognize, pick the right field yourself, or leave it on Don't import.

The fields you can fill are: first name, middle name, last name, suffix, full name, preferred name, email, other email, mobile phone, other phone, gender, birthdate, anniversary, marital status, membership status, active or inactive, date joined, date baptized, family ID, household name, role in household, head of household, child, address, address line 2, city, state, postal code, home phone, campus, tags, envelope number, school grade, school, employer, allergies, medical notes and notes, plus your church's custom fields.

Two rules apply:

Phyle needs to know who each person is: match a first name and a last name, or one Full name column. A full name can be written "John Smith" or "Smith, John".
Each Phyle field can be matched to only one column.

The options

Status when the file doesn't say: the membership status for anyone whose row has none. It starts on Attender.
Dates like 03/04/1985: whether your file writes the month or the day first. Phyle guesses from your dates. Dates written 1985-04-12 or April 12, 1985 work either way.
Update people who are already in Phyle: on to start with. See the section on people already in Phyle below.

How Phyle reads your data

Gender reads M, F, Male, Female and similar words.
Membership status reads words like Member, Regular attender, Visitor, Guest, Prospect, Inactive or Former.
Role in household reads words like Head of Household, Spouse, Adult, Child, Son, Daughter or Dependent. A Child column reads true or false, yes or no. If there's neither and the person is under 18, they're marked as a child.
Head of household reads true or false, yes or no, like Planning Center's "Household Primary Contact".
Active or inactive: a row marked inactive becomes Inactive, whatever its membership status says.
Other email is used when the main email is empty or isn't valid.
School grade reads Pre-K, Kindergarten, 1st through 12th, and also 3, 3rd grade, Grade 3, K, 0 for kindergarten and -1 for pre-K. Anything else is left empty.
Tags can hold several tags separated by commas. Tags and campuses that don't exist yet are created for you.
An email address that isn't valid is left off; the rest of the row is still imported.
A date Phyle can't read, or one that can't be right (before 1900 or in the future), makes that row a problem. Phyle never guesses.

How families are kept together

Phyle puts rows into the same household using the first of these your file has:

A Family ID: everyone with the same ID shares a household.
A Household name: everyone with the same name shares a household.
An Address: people with the same last name and street address share a household.

A row with none of these gets no household. You can add people to households later; see Households.

New households are named from the household name column, or "[Last name] Household". The address, city, state, postal code and home phone go on the household, so the whole family shares them. The person your file names as head of household (Breeze's "Head of Household" role, or Planning Center's primary contact) leads the household; spouses and other adults are adults, and children are children. When the file names no head, the first adult added to a new household becomes its head. If a household with the same name and street address is already in Phyle, people join that one instead of a copy.

Check first, then import

You can check the whole file before anything is saved:

Select Check first, change nothing. Phyle goes through every row and then puts everything back.
Read the results: Would add, Would update, New households and Would skip. Below them, Phyle shows what kind of file it read (such as Detected: Breeze export), where each column goes, and which columns aren't imported.
If you're happy, select Import for real. Phyle imports the same file with the same choices.

If you're confident, select Import [number] rows straight away instead.

Big files take a few minutes. You can leave the page; the import carries on without you. Recent imports and checks are listed under Recent imports on People › Import.

Fix rows with problems

A row with a problem, such as a missing name or an unreadable date, is skipped and leaves nothing behind. Every other row is still imported. To fix the skipped rows:

Select Download all. You get a CSV of every skipped row, with its original columns and the problem added at the front.
Fix the rows in your spreadsheet. Delete the Row and Problem columns, or set them to Don't import when you match columns.
Import that file.

People already in Phyle

With Update people who are already in Phyle on, Phyle looks for each row's person before adding anyone new. It's a match when:

the first name and email are the same, or
the first name and mobile number are the same, or
the full name is the same within the same household.

A match is updated with the values in your file; empty cells never erase what's already there. Everyone else is added as new. With the option off, every row is added as a new person.

After a big import, go to People, select More › Find duplicates, and merge anyone who came in twice. It lists people who share an email address or a first and last name.

Undo the latest import

Imported the wrong file, or matched a column wrongly? Open the import from Recent imports and use Undo this import, then Undo import.

The people the import added are removed. You can bring any of them back from People › More › Removed people.
Households it created are deleted once nobody is left in them.
Changes it made to people who were already in Phyle stay.

Only the latest import can be undone, so nothing a later import built on is pulled out from under it. If an import stops part way, the rows saved before it stopped are kept; undo it, then upload the file again.

Next guide Households