Move data in and out cleanly

A freelance interior consultant has three years of client history sitting in a spreadsheet — some rows with phone numbers formatted three different ways, a few duplicate entries from copy-paste mistakes, one column that's clearly meant to be "budget" but got labelled something else entirely — and the thought of manually re-entering all of it into a new system is enough to keep putting off the switch indefinitely.

CRM data import and export handles that spreadsheet directly. It accepts the file, lets the consultant map each messy column to the right field, and validates the data before anything actually gets imported, catching problems rather than silently importing three years of formatting inconsistencies as though they were fine. The same consultant can export everything back out at any time, in a standard format, so switching systems again later never means starting from zero.

A malformed or oversized file is the most common way an import goes wrong, and the failure mode that matters most is a partial import — some rows succeed and others fail partway through, leaving the contact list in a genuinely inconsistent state harder to untangle than either a clean success or failure would be. This is why validation needs to happen before committing anything, rather than processing row by row hoping problems are rare; a consultant reviewing a summary flagging which rows failed and why can fix the source file and retry, rather than discovering gaps weeks later during unrelated work.

The dedupe question matters just as much here as for everyday lead creation, because an import is really lead creation happening in bulk. If imported records skip the same duplicate-checking logic as a normally created contact, a spreadsheet already containing accidental duplicates — the copy-paste mistakes that accumulate in any old file — gets imported as-is, and the new system inherits and multiplies a mess it could have caught at the door. A trustworthy import checks duplicates against both the existing list and within the file itself.

Exported files deserve the same security thinking as any export of customer data, because a full contact and deal history is a complete copy of every customer's PII the business holds. That file should never be delivered as a plain downloadable link sitting in an email indefinitely — a secure, time-limited link that expires keeps an export from becoming a forgotten copy of sensitive data, accessible somewhere it shouldn't be, months after anyone needed it.