How to move customers from Excel to a CRM
Almost every company arrives at a CRM with a spreadsheet: the first customers, contacts collected by colleagues, a list exported from the invoicing software. Moving it usually takes less than an hour. It goes smoothly if you prepare the sheet before the import, not after.
1. Gather everything into one sheet
If you have several files (one per employee, per year or per city), copy them into a single sheet with the same columns. Keep one extra column with the source, such as "Anna's file" or "Trade fair 2025": after the import it becomes a tag, and you will know where each customer came from.
Rules for the sheet:
- The first row holds the headers. No titles above the table and no empty rows between customers.
- One customer per row. If a company has three contact people, that is three rows with the same company name.
- One piece of information per column. Phone, email and city in separate columns, not "0691234567, [email protected]" in one cell.
- No merged cells and no totals at the bottom.
2. Clean the data that breaks imports
Five minutes here save an hour of fixes later:
- Phone numbers: leave them as they are, with a leading zero or a country code. The CRM turns them into the international format with your company's country code on its own (for example 069123456 becomes +37369123456). Only remove notes such as "call after 6 pm".
- Emails: one address per cell. A second address goes into a separate column.
- Country: either the name ("Moldova", "Romania") or the two-letter code (MD, RO). Both are recognised.
- Names: if the full name sits in one column ("John Smith"), that is fine — it is split into first and last name automatically.
- Obvious duplicates: sort by email or phone and look at neighbouring rows.
3. Save the sheet as CSV
CRMs import CSV files: a plain table with no formatting.
- Excel: File → Save As → type CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited). The UTF-8 variant keeps accented and Cyrillic letters intact.
- Google Sheets: File → Download → Comma-separated values (.csv).
- LibreOffice: Save As → Text CSV, with the Unicode (UTF-8) character set.
If you see odd symbols instead of accented letters after the import, the file was saved in another encoding. In Intrawebix CRM you change it right in the import window (Windows-1250 for Central European languages, Windows-1251 for Cyrillic), without saving the file again.
4. Import and check before saving
In Intrawebix CRM, open the list you are importing into — contacts, companies, leads or deals — and click Import.
- Pick the file. The separator (comma or semicolon) is detected automatically.
- Check the column matching. Common headers match on their own, in English, Romanian and Russian, as do the headers of exports from Bitrix24, HubSpot, Zoho or amoCRM. Leave the columns you don't need on "don't import".
- Map the source column to Tags.
- Click Check: you see how many rows will go in and what errors there are, without saving anything.
- Click Import.
A bad row doesn't stop the rest: the error list shows the row and the reason, so you fix only those rows and import them separately.
5. Contacts or leads?
- Contacts and companies — people and businesses you have already worked with: customers, partners.
- Leads — people who asked for something but have not bought yet. Each one gets a status and an owner, so nobody is left without an answer.
If the sheet mixes the two, make two files and import them separately. Contacts that belong to a company have the Account (name) column: the company is created automatically if it does not exist.
6. Owners and duplicates
- Owner (email): a column with the email of the colleague who handles the customer splits customers between the team during the import. Without it, you are the owner. Invite your colleagues to the CRM first.
- Duplicates: tick Skip duplicates during the import — customers that already have the same email, phone or company name are not created again. Whatever slips through, the Duplicates page finds and merges, with the full history.
7. After the import
- Open a few records at random and check the phone, email and company.
- Filter by the source tag: check that every customer from each file made it in.
- Keep the original spreadsheet for a few weeks as an archive.
- From now on, new customers go straight into the CRM — from your website form, WhatsApp or calls — not into the sheet.
What to take from the spreadsheet and what not
From the sheet you take the customers. Their history (what was discussed, which quotes were sent) usually lives in emails and in your colleagues' memory. Don't try to rebuild all of it: add a short note on the records of your key customers, and from here on the history builds up by itself.
You can try the import on the free 30-day account: if something doesn't come out right, delete it and import again — and if you like, we do the first import for you.