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AdministrationData Import

Data Import

How to bring existing data into FSManager when you’re getting started, and what tools the system provides for ongoing imports.

What FSManager imports natively

Two import flows ship at Lite tier:

  • Quote Importer — parses estimation-software files (V6, X1) into a quote revision’s budget and items. Used on every quote you import, not just at setup. See Quoting → Re-estimating from import.
  • Customer Merge — consolidates duplicate customer records (and their child records) into one. Used when CSV-pasted data ends up with near-duplicates, or when historical data is messy.

What’s not built in at Lite:

  • No bulk CSV / Excel import for Customers, Contacts, Suppliers, or Products as ready-to-use admin features.
  • No batch-import UI for general master-data bootstrap.

This is deliberate — the data inside FSManager is heavily relational (a Customer has Contacts, an Opportunity links a Customer to a Quote, a Job inherits specifications from its winning Quote Revision). A naive CSV import would either lose those relationships or require fragile cross-reference columns. FSManager prefers to either:

  1. Enter the seed data once, manually, while you and your team are learning the product anyway, or
  2. Have a one-off migration done by FSM Support for businesses with large historical datasets.

Quote Importer

Available at every tier, including Lite. Quote Importer takes a file exported from your estimation software and loads it into a quote revision.

Supported formats

  • V6 File — FSManager v6 XML export.
  • X1 File — alternative estimation-software format.

Set your tenant’s default format in Administration → Quote Importer Settings.

How it works

  1. From a quote revision in Estimating stage, click Complete from Import.
  2. Pick the import file (and optionally the schedule, BOM, and labour PDFs that pair with it).
  3. The importer parses the file and tries to link every product, colour, glass type, hardware item, reveal, flashing, and labour entry to the matching entity in your FSManager catalogue.
  4. Anything it can’t auto-link triggers a link-resolution popup: pick the right inventory entity for each unmatched item.
  5. The importer attaches the source file to the revision so it can be re-parsed at job creation (e.g. to bring the spec into the JobPart).
  6. The revision transitions to Draft with the parsed items in the budget.

See Quoting & Sales for the full workflow.

Sales price mode

Configure how the importer treats price data, in Administration → Quote Importer Settings:

  • None — import cost only; you set sales price yourself.
  • Sales Price (recommended) — import the price from the estimation file.
  • Discounted Sales Price — use the discounted variant when your estimation software computes one.

Customer Merge

For consolidating duplicates after a messy import or after years of data drift.

When to use it

  • You’ve ended up with two Customer records for the same business (e.g. “ABC Joinery” and “ABC Joinery Ltd”).
  • A merger or rebrand created multiple records for what’s now one entity.
  • A spreadsheet upload created near-duplicates with slight name variations.

How it works

  1. Open Customers list view.
  2. Multi-select the duplicate records.
  3. Run the Merge Customers action.
  4. Pick which record to keep.
  5. All children (Opportunities, Quotes, Jobs, Contacts) are re-parented to the kept record; the duplicates are soft-deleted.

Merge is admin-only and the source records are deleted (soft). Double-check the kept record is the right one before confirming.

See CRM → Merge duplicate customers for the full action walkthrough.

Getting seed data in manually

For first-time setup, the practical path:

Customers and contacts

  1. Pull a list of your current customers from your previous system (spreadsheet, accounting package, contact list).
  2. Don’t try to bulk-paste it. Enter the top 20–50 manually — it teaches your team where things live, and 20–50 is usually enough to start operating.
  3. Add the rest on demand — every time you quote a new customer or take a phone call, create them then. Within a month or two, your active customer base is captured.

This sounds like grunt work, but it’s also how teams build muscle memory for where everything is — and you discover data-quality issues (duplicate emails, missing phone numbers) as you go.

Customer contacts

Same pattern. When you create a Customer, FSManager prompts for at least one Contact. Add the primary contact then; add the rest the first time you actually need to talk to them.

Products, colours, glass, hardware

These come from dieholders — the extrusion system providers you picked in the Setup Wizard. If you set up the wizard correctly, your product catalogue is already populated.

If you missed a dieholder during setup, add it under Administration → Dieholders. The cascade adds its products/colours/glass to your tenant.

Suppliers

Similar — pre-built list in the Setup Wizard (Step 5). Tick the ones you use. Add custom suppliers later under Administration → Suppliers.

Employees

Manual entry. Each Employee record is small (name, department, position, email) and tied to permissions and PINs that should be deliberate per person. See User Management.

For big migrations: talk to FSM Support

If you’re migrating from a previous system with thousands of customers, tens of thousands of historical quotes, or years of job data, a manual approach isn’t realistic. Reach out to support@fsmanager.co.nz to scope a migration:

  • We can ingest your data through scripts that preserve relationships.
  • Pricing depends on data volume and shape.
  • The result is your real history available from day one inside FSManager.

What we typically need:

  • A CSV / Excel export of customers with relational keys (the primary key from your previous system).
  • A matching contact export linked to those keys.
  • (Optional) Historical opportunity / quote / job data with the same linking key.

Tips & gotchas

  • Resist bulk-pasting. It feels productive but creates data-quality issues you’ll spend the next year cleaning up. Seed slowly and deliberately.
  • The Setup Wizard does most of the heavy lifting. Dieholders bring products. Suppliers, departments, and positions all have pre-built lists — tick what you use rather than building from scratch.
  • Customer Merge is your safety net. If a bad CSV does sneak in, you can recover with Merge — but it’s painstaking. Prevention beats cure.
  • Quote Importer is the friend you’ll use for years. Even after seeding, every imported quote saves you 10 minutes of typing — it’s worth getting Quote Importer Settings dialled in.
  • Don’t be precious about handing off migrations. A weekend of professional services from FSM Support beats two months of in-house data hassles.
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