Importing and Adding Names

People are at the heart of everything in ChurchTrac. That's why we've made the process of importing your people into ChurchTrac really easy. You can import your people data in two different ways:

• Have us import your data from another church software (Easiest)
• Have us import your data from a spreadsheet

Importing from another Church Software

If you are using another cloud-based church software, our team can export your people data from it into ChurchTrac. To do this, create a Support Ticket and provide us with the following:

• The provider name
• Your login credentials
• Your password

We will take care of the rest!

Importing from a Spreadsheet

We've included a spreadsheet template file that you can open in Excel, Numbers, or your favorite spreadsheet application. We recommend that you use this template as a starting point or reference. If you already have a spreadsheet that contains the data you wish to import, you can use our template to guide you.

Each row of your spreadsheet should contain information for only one individual. If you are importing 150 people, then your spreadsheet will have 151 rows (one row for each person, plus a header row indicating what data is found in each column).

Each column in your spreadsheet will contain a specific type of data, like First Name, Mobile Phone, Email Address, and so on. You should set up your spreadsheet with the columns as described below.

Once you've finished formatting your excel sheet, creat a Support Ticket and attach your sheet for our import to begin the process of importing your data.

REQUIRED FIELDS

There are 3 required fields for every individual in your church database: First Name, Last Name, & Family Name.

COLUMN A: FIRST NAME (Required). Do not leave this field blank, and do not combine multiple first names together in one row (DO NOT DO THIS: George & Martha). Instead, put George on the first row with his information, and Martha on another row with her information. If you need to add a suffix or middle initial, add it to this column (Like this: George E. or George, Jr.).

COLUMN B: LAST NAME (Required). Do not leave this field blank. Do not add a suffix for middle initial to the Last Name column (use the First Name column instead!)

NOTE: Everyone in your database must have a unique name (You can't have two Bill Smiths). The ChurchTrac importer will skip any rows where the first and last name fields are an exact match to another row. If two people share the same name, you should add something to the First Name field of both rows to distinguish between these two individuals. For example, you can add Jr., Sr., a middle initial, or even a nickname to the First Name field, allowing our import script to process and import all rows.

COLUMN C: FAMILY NAME/ASSIGNMENT (Required). Do not leave this field blank. The data in this column should be entered in the following format: LASTNAME, FirstName and SpouseName. We recommend that you use ALL CAPS for the LASTNAME portion of the family name. Leave off the SpouseName part if that doesn't apply. Every member of a family, including the children, should have the exact same value in the Family Name column on your spreadsheet! A person's family assignment in ChurchTrac will be made based on the value of this column.

TIP: You should place family member rows together on your spreadsheet, with the head of household listed first, followed by spouse (if applicable), followed by children (if applicable). A family of five will therefore fill 5 rows on your spreadsheet, with the first couple of rows being the parents, followed by the third, fourth and fifth rows containing data for the children. Your spreadsheet will be imported one row at a time, from top to bottom. Whenever a row has a different Family Name from the rows above it, ChurchTrac's import script will automatically create a new "Family" in your database, and assign each person with the same Family Name to that family.

INDIVIDUAL FIELDS

What's the difference between an individual field and a family field? When you click a person's name on the People screen in ChurchTrac, you'll see both individual information (at the top) and family information (on the bottom of the screen) for that person. Individual information is data that is entered for each person, like First Name, Birthday and Mobile Phone. All the columns above are considered to be "Individual" fields. Family fields, on the other hand, are shared by each person that is assigned to the same family. For example, every member of the Smith family will share the same Home Address and Formal Greeting. The fields/columns described below are family fields, and will therefore shared by all family members.

COLUMN D, E and F: BIRTH YEAR, BIRTH MONTH, and BIRTH DAY. Enter only numeric values for these three columns. You don't have to include birthdays, but if you do, you have a couple options. First, you can include all three columns to provide a complete birthday for each individual. Alternatively, you can skip Column D (Year) and include only Column E (Month) and Column F (Day). This second approach works well when you don't know the year, or when you choose not to include the birth year.

TIP: Instead of using using three columns for Birthday, you can instead enter the full birthday in just one column (Column D) in MM/DD/YYYY format. For any person who has a full birthday like this in Column D, leave Columns E and F blank.

COLUMN G: EMAIL ADDRESS. Do not enter more than one email address per row/person. Be sure the email address is formatted properly. Do not add more than one email address to each cell.

COLUMN H: ENVELOPE or MEMBER NUMBER. If you have a numeric or alphanumeric value assigned to individuals, enter that value in this column. You'll be able to enter Giving screen contributions by this Member Number (or also by Name).

COLUMN I: MOBILE PHONE NUMBER. Use this column to specify a person's mobile or cell phone number. Be sure to include the area code. This is the phone number that will be used when you send SMS messages from ChurchTrac. You should not add more than one mobile number to each cell.

COLUMN J: MEMBER STATUS. This column should be one word, like 'Member', 'Guest', or 'Child'. This data will be imported to your Member Status field on the People screen. Like many fields in ChurchTrac, you can customize the options for this field to match the list of items used by your church.

COLUMN K: ACTIVE. This column should only contain the word Yes or No. This data is imported to the "Active" select box on your People screen. This field should contain the word Yes if the person if considered 'Active', or No if the person is considered to be 'Inactive'. If left blank, names will be imported as 'Active' on the People screen.

COLUMN L: FAMILY ROLE. If included, the value should be Primary, Spouse, Child or Other.

That wraps up our Individual fields...now we move on to Family fields.

FAMILY FIELDS

When ChurchTrac creates a new family, that family will be created using the data in Columns M through S from the first family member's row on the spreadsheet. For this reason, it is not necessary to include Columns M through S for the second, third, fourth, etc. family members. If you do include data for subsequent family members, it will be ignored.

COLUMN M: FORMAL FAMILY GREETING. If included, we recommend that you format the data the way you would when addressing an envelope to be mailed to this family. For example: Mr. and Mrs. George Washington. This field is used for printing family mailing labels.

COLUMN N: INFORMAL FAMILY GREETING. If included, just include the family members' first name, like this: George and Martha.

COLUMN O: HOME ADDRESS. Include the first line of the family's physical or mailing address.

COLUMN P: CITY --or-- CITY, STATE and ZIP/POSTAL CODE.

COLUMN Q: STATE. You don't need to include any data in this column if you used the full City, State and ZIP in the column above.

COLUMN R: ZIP or POSTAL CODE. You don't need to include any data in this column if you used the full City, State and ZIP in the column above.

Either format for address is acceptable.

COLUMN S: HOME/FAMILY PHONE. For families that still have a shared family phone or landline, you can include that phone number here. Be sure to include the area code.

That wraps up the Family field section...there's one final (optional) section that you can import.

USER-DEFINED FIELDS

COLUMNS T and beyond: USER DEFINED FIELDS. You may have additional information for each individual or family that you want to import that is not specified above. In most cases, a user-defined field is the best solution. You should create a new user-defined field for each additional column of data that you want to import. Keep in mind that ChurchTrac includes some sample user-defined fields to get you started. For more information about user-defined fields, be sure to check out our User-Defined Fields support article.

For user-defined date fields, we recommend that your column be set to "Text" as this prevents Excel from converting your date into a different format.

IMPORTANT NOTE: There are several user-defined field types. When creating your user-defined field, be sure to create the field using the field type that best fits the data that you want to import or use for that field. For example, you can import Yes/No type fields, Date fields (with or without a year), Selection list fields, or Text fields. If you have a question about which field type is best for a certain column on your spreadsheet, please don't hesitate to ask!

Church Directory Importing FAQS

Your first import is free in ChurchTrac. We recommend submitting a data import to our team when you have all the people information that you need to be imported.

Yes! We recommend having us import your data on a trial, as it gives you a better idea on how ChurchTrac can help your ministry.

Unfortunately no. We discontinued support for ChurchTrac 9 and below and are no longer able to import ChurchTrac 9 files.

To import giving data for your people, see our Importing Contributions article.