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Importing employee data

Using CSV spreadsheets to quickly add and update employee profiles

Joel Beverley avatar
Written by Joel Beverley
Updated over a week ago

You can add new employees, and update existing employee profiles, using our CSV upload function.

The import allows you to fill in a spreadsheet file with employee data, and upload it to make a large number of changes in one go. You can both create new employees, and update existing ones, using this method. 

The import feature is available to account Administrators and Managers. As a Manager, you'll need your Administrator to enable the option highlighted below before you can import employee data.

The import needs to be done in our format, and you can download a template of our format to fill in yourself here:

If you already have a full list of employees, and want to update lots of their profiles in bulk, then we recommend downloading your Employee Export first using the button highlighted below, as this will contain all the existing info in the right format. Update the columns with the new information, then upload the resulting CSV file.

This is useful if you want to do large-scale changes, such as:

  • Populating wage/salary data for multiple employees at once

  • Assigning lots of employees to groups

You can also make small changes to your Employees’ profiles within RotaCloud itself. There are details on how to do that here.

Formatting

  • If you are updating an existing employee, rather than creating a new one, you must ensure that the Employee ID is present in the first column. If not, then the system will create a new employee using the details in that row.

  • Account Types must be exactly ‘employee’, ‘manager’ or ‘admin’.

  • Dates must be written using the format YYYY-MM-DD.

  • If assigning multiple roles to an employee, separate them with commas, and do not use quotes.

  • If the employee has regularly repeating days off, format these using the 3-letter abbreviations, separated by commas.

  • Salaries and wage rates must be formatted only as numbers, with no £ or other currency symbols.

Common errors

  • If your import encounters an error on any of the rows you’re importing, then that row will show a red mark to the left of it. Hover over this icon to see the reason why the import hasn’t worked.

  • You are able to import Custom Role Rates using the Import tool, however each of these columns will not be automatically identified by RotaCloud. You will need to manually assign the columns using the drop-down menu at the top of each column.

  • You cannot create new Roles, Groups or Locations using this import, only assign currently-existing ones. Please ensure that you’ve already created all the groups, roles, etc. that you’re assigning in their respective pages under the Company tab.

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