CSV imports

At a glance

Who uses it: Admins rostering staff and students.
When to use it: At year start, periodically for mid-year deltas, or any time you don't (yet) have an SIS / LMS integration.
Permissions required: Administrator.
Navigation path: Administration → Imports (with subpages for Teachers, Students, Student assignments, Staff).

Purpose

CSV import is the universal rostering path — it works regardless of which SIS or LMS you use, and it is the foundation underneath the supported integrations.

The four importers

Importer	Required columns	Purpose
Teachers	`email`, `full_name`	Create/update teacher directory and send portal invites
Students	`student_id`, `first_name`, `last_name`, `grade`	Create/update student records
Student assignments	`student_id`, `teacher_email` and/or `facilitator_email`	Attach students to staff
Staff	`email`, `first_name`, `last_name`, `roles` (pipe-delimited)	Create/update non-teacher staff with one or more roles

Detailed column lists live on each importer's own article:

Managing teachers — teacher CSV
Importing students — student + assignment CSVs

How an import is processed

Upload — you pick a file.
Preview — the platform parses headers, validates rows, and shows counts (new / update / error) without writing anything.
Seat-cap check — if the import would exceed your plan's seat or student cap, the import is blocked before writes happen.
Confirm — you accept the preview. Writes happen in a single batch.
History — a batch record is created. See Import history.

Encoding & formatting

UTF-8 strongly recommended — apostrophes and accented characters fail or render wrong in other encodings.
CSV with comma separator (no semicolons, no tabs).
First row is the header.
Quoted fields OK; quote any field that contains commas.
Empty cells are treated as "leave unchanged" on updates, not "set to null."

Idempotency

Re-importing the same CSV is safe. Matching rows update; new rows create. The platform deduplicates by email (for users / teachers) and student_id (for students).

Tips & best practices

Always do a small (5–10 row) test import first when working from a new source system.
Run Teachers before Student assignments — assignments fail when the referenced teacher emails don't exist yet.
Keep your source spreadsheet under version control (a Google Sheet with edit history works) so you can compare what you sent.

Common mistakes

Mixed encodings (a UTF-8 file saved as Windows-1252 from Excel) — open and resave in a UTF-8-aware editor.
Trying to set email to a different value on update — that breaks auth identity. Edit through the Users page instead.

FAQ

Is there a row cap per import? There is no hard cap; large imports are processed asynchronously. Plan-tier seat caps still apply.

Will an import overwrite my data if I make a mistake? Empty cells don't overwrite existing values. Cells with content do update. Test with a small batch first if you're nervous.