Importing clients from a file

In the Clients view, a More Options > Import Clients from File option is available if:

• Clients are enabled for your firm
• Your firm is set to allow client import from files
• You are an advisor, read-write assistant, or administrator

If the feature is available, you can use it to import clients from a comma-separated values (.csv) file into the system. For each row in the file, the import process creates a client assigned to the advisor. Clients created using file import are given the permission "May edit credentials and all account information". The process creates a status file that indicates for each row whether the client was successfully created or not.

Note: if your firm is set to require a FIRM_TAG field to have a value, clients will not be created and an error message will be produced.

Client import file requirements

The client import file must be a .csv file with one header row and one row for each client to be created, with a maximum of 10,000 rows. The file must have the five columns as described here.

Column header	Description	Required Column?
FIRST_NAME	User's first name, maximum of 64 characters, minimum of one character	Yes
MIDDLE_NAME	User's optional middle name, maximum of 64 characters	No
LAST_NAME	User's last name, maximum of 64 characters, minimum of one character	Yes
EMAIL	User's email address, maximum of 64 chars, must contain one @ character	No
TAX_ID	User's tax ID (SSN or TIN), maximum of 32 characters. (Minimum of one character if firm requires SSN/TIN.)	Only required if firm is set to have investors require SSN/TIN value

If there are more than 10,000 rows the extra rows will be ignored and a warning message will be included in the results of the import.

The client's key will either be the TAX_ID (when the firm requires it) or the combination of the first, middle, and last name. Clients are only created when they are not duplicates, based on the keys. If there are multiple records with same input key(s), then the first client is created and any subsequent record with the same key is skipped.

Steps for importing Clients from File

1. Prepare the file in accordance with the requirements listed above.
2. In the Clients view, click More Actions and select Import Clients from File.
3. Click Browse and select the file.
4. Click Upload.
5. When the upload completes, the Clients view refreshes to show the new clients in the client table.
6. You can check and/or download the status files for the import any time during your current working session, which is until the session times out or you log out.

Checking the status file of the import

1. To see details about the import, click the Import Ready link next to the More Actions button.
2. Download the importstatus_yourfilename.zip file.
3. The zip file contains a README.txt file that indicates the number of imported clients processed, the number that imported successfully, and the number that failed to import. It may also include error messages if the system did not recognize the file format.
4. The zip file also contains a importstatus_yourfilename.csv file. Note that it is the same as the file you imported, but with two new status columns: Load Status and Load Details. These columns indicate the import's treatment of each row.

   Load Status	Load Details
   Succeeded	New investor record created from import record.
   Succeeded	Import record ignored because it matched an existing investor
   Succeeded	New investor created from import record but failed to send welcome email to investor
   Failed	Failed to import because a required field has no data: <name of field>
   Failed	Failed to import because of invalid data in field <name of field>
   Failed	Failed to import because of system error
   Failed	Failed to import because exhausted maximum attempts to generate unique login

5. Files can be imported more than once, and the system will not duplicate clients it has already created.
   If there are failures due to missing or invalid data, you can make fixes to the importstatus_yourfilename.zip file and import it. The system will strip out and replace any information in the Load Status and Load Detail columns with new content, and it will not duplicate clients it has already created.