How to Import Contacts from a Spreadsheet Without Errors

Almost every business starting on SimpliSend already has a contact list somewhere - a POS export, a booking system report, a spreadsheet someone's been maintaining for years. The import tool is built around that reality: it reads the file you already have rather than asking you to reformat it first.

Step 1: preview before committing

Uploading a CSV or XLSX file first goes through a preview step that detects the columns in your file and shows a five-row sample - nothing is saved to your contact list at this point. This is the moment to catch a problem: a phone number column that's actually being read as a date by the spreadsheet software, or a column you expected to see that isn't there.

Step 2: map your columns

Every column in your file gets mapped to a target field - a phone number, a name, or a custom field you'll later use as a template variable. Exactly one column has to map to the phone number field for the import to proceed; everything else is optional. If your file has a column called "Cell", "Mobile", or "Contact Number" instead of "Phone", that's fine - the mapping step is exactly what handles that.

Common mistakes to avoid

• Phone numbers stored with inconsistent formatting (071 234 5678 vs +27712345678) - the platform normalises common South African formats, but wildly inconsistent data is worth cleaning first
• A spreadsheet with merged header cells or multiple header rows, which confuses column detection
• Leaving blank rows in the middle of the sheet, which can throw off the preview sample
• Mapping a column you don't actually want imported - anything unmapped is simply skipped, so leave it unmapped rather than force-mapping it

After the import

Once committed, the imported contacts appear in your contact list immediately, with any custom fields available right away as template variables - so a column like "Membership Tier" or "Last Purchase Date" can be dropped straight into a message template without any extra setup. If you need to bring in the same source again later - say, a POS export you run every month - you can re-upload and map it the same way each time.

For contact data that lives in a live database rather than a spreadsheet, see our guide to connecting an external database as a contact source - that path keeps your list in sync automatically instead of needing a fresh export each time.