What You Import for Accounts and Contacts

Importing account and contact data is somewhat complex compared to importing other objects. That's because customer data, such as organizations, addresses, and contact points, are stored as different objects in the application.

Here's some things to remember about account and contact import:

• To identify it, each object has a unique ID. You can use the IDs to relate the data you import. For example, your account import includes a unique ID for each organization.
• You can enter that unique ID into the contact import file to establish the relationship between the contact and the organization.
• The unique reference ID you add to each record also lets you to update the information later.

What You Import for Accounts

You use the account import macro file to import basic information about the organizations you do business with, such as:

• Organization name
• Account type: The account can be of type customer or prospect. A customer is an account you've sold to in the past.
• Industry classification
• Account owner: The salesperson who owns the account
• Primary address: You can import additional addresses for accounts using a separate macro file.
• Phone
• Fax
• URL
• Parent account: Importing the parent account for each account creates the account hierarchy.

What you import is a subset of what's available in the UI. You might need to import this other information separately:

• Attachments. See How do I import attachments?for more information.
• Primary contact information. You use the contact import macro file to import primary contacts.

Here's how the information you see in UI relates to what you import:

• You import the basic account information, including the primary address, using the account import macro.
• You enter the parent account in the account import macro to create the account hierarchy.
• The basic organization information and primary address you import using the account import macro.
• Attachments you import separately (no macro available).
• You import primary contact information using the contact import macro.
• A parent account is imported along with the account.

What You Import for Contacts

You import a contact's basic information. This includes the name, the primary address, phone, and other contact information, as well as the contact owner and the account, if any. You can import multiple addresses for a contact using the separate address import macro.