Importing Data

Smart Import lets you bring data into Campflow from any spreadsheet. Whether you’re migrating from another system, importing a list of new families, or loading payments in bulk, the import wizard walks you through the process step by step. It auto-detects your columns, cleans up formatting issues, matches against existing records, and lets you review everything before anything is saved.

What You Can Import

When you open the Import page from the sidebar, you’ll first choose what type of data you’re importing:

Families & Campers — Import family information, camper details, enrollments, fees, payments, signatures, and custom fields all at once. The wizard figures out what’s in your file based on the columns you map.
Expenses — Import expense transactions and categories from a spreadsheet.

The rest of this article covers the Families & Campers import. Expense imports work similarly but with a simpler set of fields.

Step 1: Upload Your File

Go to the Import page from the sidebar.
Choose Families & Campers.
Drag your file onto the upload area, or click to browse for it.

Campflow accepts CSV, Excel (.xlsx, .xls), and LibreOffice (.ods) files up to 50MB. Files can contain up to 10,000 rows.

If your file has multiple sheets (like an Excel workbook), you’ll see them listed with row counts. Select which sheets to include — sheets with data are selected automatically.

Once the file is uploaded and processed, click Next to move to column mapping.

Step 2: Map Columns

Campflow reads your column headers and automatically maps them to fields. You’ll see a table with each column from your spreadsheet, what Campflow thinks it matches to, and a few sample values so you can verify.

How Mapping Works

Auto-detected columns are shown with their best match pre-selected. Common headers like “Last Name,” “Phone,” “Address,” and “Email” are recognized automatically.
Unrecognized columns show as “Skip this column” — meaning they won’t be imported unless you manually assign them.
To change a mapping, click the dropdown for that column and search or browse the available fields.

Fields are organized into groups: Family Info, Camper Info, Enrollment, Medical & Emergency, Financial (fees and payments), Custom Fields, and Identifiers.

Required Fields

The wizard won’t let you proceed without enough information to identify records:

You need either a Family ID column, or a Last Name plus at least one secondary identifier (email, phone, or parent name). This prevents ambiguous matches — “Cohen” alone isn’t enough, but “Cohen” with a phone number or father’s name narrows it down.
If importing fees, you’ll need a Fee Description and Fee Amount.
If importing payments, you’ll need at least a Payment Amount.

Duplicate Mappings

Each field can only be mapped to one column. If you accidentally map two columns to the same field, the wizard will tell you which field is duplicated.

Step 3: Clean Up (When Needed)

This step only appears if the wizard detects data that needs attention. It might not show at all if your data is clean. Issues the wizard can detect and help you fix:

Full Names in First-Name Columns

If a column mapped to “First Name” contains what looks like full names (e.g., “Moshe Cohen” instead of just “Moshe”), the wizard offers to split them into separate first and last name fields automatically.

Combined Addresses

If your address column contains full addresses like “123 Main St, Brooklyn, NY 11201” but city, state, and ZIP aren’t mapped separately, the wizard offers to split the address into its parts.

School and City Normalization

If the same school or city is spelled differently across rows (e.g., “Yeshiva Torah Academy” and “Torah Academy”), the wizard groups similar values and offers to standardize them. You can apply the suggestion or skip it.

Unrecognized Values

For fields that expect specific values — like approval status, grade, term, or custom dropdown fields — the wizard shows any values it doesn’t recognize and lets you map them to the correct option.

Approval status — If a value doesn’t match any of your configured statuses, you can assign it to an existing status or clear it.
Grades — If a grade name doesn’t match (e.g., “3rd grade” vs. “Grade 3”), the wizard tries to fuzzy-match it and suggests a correction for your confirmation.
Term — Values like “Full” or “First Half” that don’t match the expected format can be resolved here.
Custom dropdown fields — Any custom select fields with values not matching the configured options are flagged for resolution.

Default Values

If you didn’t map a column for grade, term, or approval status, the wizard offers a default value picker so every imported record gets assigned one.

Step 4: Review

The review step shows you exactly what will happen when you import. You’ll see a preview of the first 100 rows with match results:

New records — Families or campers that don’t exist in Campflow yet. These will be created.
Matched records — Families or campers that match existing records. These will be updated with the data from your spreadsheet.

Controlling What Happens

For each matched row, you can choose:

Update — Merge the imported data into the existing record
Skip — Leave the existing record untouched

Use the Update All or Skip All buttons to quickly set all matched rows at once.

If the preview shows data errors (like a required field missing on a new record), those rows are flagged. You can edit cell values directly in the preview table to fix issues.

Data Cleaning Summary

At the top of the review step, you’ll see a summary of what the wizard cleaned automatically:

Phone numbers formatted
Names cleaned up (capitalization, extra spaces)
Dates standardized
Emails normalized
Currency values cleaned

This is informational — the cleaning has already been applied. It just tells you what was adjusted.

Step 5: Import

When you’re satisfied with the preview, click Start Import. The wizard processes the data:

For smaller files (under 200 rows), the import runs immediately and you’ll see a progress bar.
For larger files, the import runs in the background using queued jobs. You can close the page and come back — the progress will be waiting.

When the import finishes, you’ll see a summary showing how many families were created, how many were updated, and how many campers were added.

If fees were included in the import, Campflow will automatically calculate the fee totals for the affected families after the import completes.

Starting Over

At any point during the wizard, you can go back to previous steps using the Back button. Going back clears any decisions you made in later steps, so you’ll need to redo the review if you change your mapping.

If you need to start completely fresh with a different file, go back to Step 1 and remove the uploaded file.

Good to Know

The wizard is designed to handle messy real-world data. Don’t worry about cleaning your spreadsheet perfectly before uploading — Campflow handles phone formatting, name capitalization, date formats, and more.
You can import into an existing camp with existing data. The wizard matches against your current records and gives you control over what gets updated.
The import respects the current season. Enrollments, fees, and payments are created under the season you have selected.
Custom fields you’ve configured for families, campers, or enrollments can be imported — they appear in the field mapping dropdown under their respective groups.
If the import includes siblings (multiple campers in the same family), the wizard automatically groups them into the same family, so you won’t end up with duplicate family records.
If something looks off after an import or data isn’t showing up as expected, try reloading the page.
You can re-import a corrected file at any time. Campflow matches rows to existing families using last name combined with email, phone number, or parent names. Matched families can be updated, skipped, or overwritten — you choose for each one in the review step. Only non-empty cells in your file will update existing data, so blank cells won’t erase information that’s already there.