CarpetBossPro Blog — Carpet Cleaning Software

Importing Your Customer List Into Carpet Cleaning Software With a CSV

Your customer list is the most valuable thing your carpet cleaning company owns. Years of homeowners who trust you, landlords who call every time a tenant leaves, offices on maintenance. Moving to new software should not mean typing all of them in by hand. A CSV import brings them over in one go.

Part of the First Week

The plan in The First Week on New Carpet Cleaning Software: A Day-by-Day Plan assumes your customers are already in the system. This article covers getting them there.

What a CSV Is

A CSV is a plain spreadsheet file — rows and columns, saved in a format almost any program can read. If your customers are in a spreadsheet, you can save it as CSV. If they are in another program, it almost certainly has an export to CSV. If they are in a notebook, typing them into a spreadsheet first is usually faster than entering each one into the software separately, because a spreadsheet lets you move quickly from row to row.

Prepare the Spreadsheet

A little cleanup before importing saves a lot of cleanup after. Aim for one row per customer address, with clear columns:

• First name and last name, or company name
• Phone number
• Email
• Street address, city, state or province, and ZIP or postal code
• Any notes you want to keep

Then tidy it up:

• Remove duplicates. The same family listed twice will become two clients, with their history split between them.
• Fix addresses. Complete street addresses with city and postal code place more accurately on the map.
• Separate the columns. If a single cell has “John Smith 555-0101 12 Oak St,” split it into its own columns.
• Drop customers you will never serve again. Moved away, out of your area, or not worth keeping.

Run the Import

In CarpetBossPro, the CSV import brings your customers in from the spreadsheet you prepared. Imported addresses are placed on the map automatically, so they show up on the Waiting List map and the dispatch board without any extra step. No one has to drop pins by hand.

After the import, spot-check a handful of customers. Open a few records, look at their addresses on the map, and make sure the names, phones and emails landed in the right places. If something is off, it is easier to fix the spreadsheet and import again than to fix hundreds of records by hand.

Handle Multi-Address Clients

Landlords, property managers and offices with several locations should end up as one client with many addresses, not as many separate clients. If your spreadsheet has the same company on several rows with different addresses, check after the import that they are organized the way you want. The structure is covered in One Client, Many Addresses: Organizing Carpet Cleaning Customers.

Set commercial clients and property managers to Monthly billing if they get one statement a month.

After the Import: The Carpet Details

An import brings over who your customers are and where they live. The carpet-specific details usually come next. For each repeat customer, add:

• Minimum days between visits — a year, six months, a month.
• Their last job — the rooms, square feet, carpet type, method and add-ons from their most recent cleaning, with its date.
• Access notes — where to park the van, where to run the hose, pets, gate codes.

That last job matters most. It decides when the customer comes due, and every future job at that address fills in from it. Start with the customers you expect to call soonest — the ones who were cleaned around this time last year — and work outward.

Use the Map to Check Your Work

Once the addresses are on the map, look at it. A map of your customers is a quick way to catch problems. A pin in the wrong state means a typo in the address. A pin far outside your service area might be a customer who moved, or one you should drop. A cluster you did not expect might be a neighborhood worth marketing to.

The map also shows you where your repeat work lives. Once minimum days and last jobs are added, the same pins turn into the Waiting List, colored by who is due now and who is overdue.

Tags Make the List Useful

Once customers are in, add tags: Residential, Commercial, Property Manager, Yearly Plan, Pets, Upholstery Customer. Tags help you find groups of customers quickly, and they make reports useful. If your old spreadsheet already had a column for customer type, use it to tag customers right after the import.

Keep the Old File

Save a copy of the CSV you imported and the original file it came from. If you ever need to check what was in the old system, you will have it. After a season in the new software, you probably will not need it, but it costs nothing to keep.

To see how your imported customers flow into the Waiting List, dispatch and billing, return to the CarpetBossPro carpet cleaning software page.