Importing your roster

Which importer to use

There are two importers, and it’s worth knowing which one you’re in.

• The Migration Assistant at /dashboard/admin/migrate is the one to use. It handles a Homeschool-Life.com export and any other CSV, saves your progress partway through, and lets you correct how columns line up before anything imports.
• Admin › Settings › Import is an older, narrower tool. It only understands Homeschool-Life.com exports. Feeding it a spreadsheet from anywhere else will not produce useful results.

Once you’ve completed an import, the assistant replaces itself with a short confirmation card. That’s expected, not a bug. If you have a second batch to bring over, click Import another batch on that card.

Getting your file ready

Coming from Homeschool-Life.com

The assistant walks you through this on its first screen, and it takes about a minute.

Coming from a spreadsheet

Any CSV works as long as each row is one family. Put your column names in the first row and give them names a person would understand, since that’s what the mapping step reads. You don’t need to match our field names or reorder anything.

Uploading it

Drag your file onto the upload box or click to choose it. CSV, TSV, and TXT are accepted, up to 10MB. If your file is bigger than that, split it and import the pieces one after another. There’s also a Or paste your data instead option if it’s easier to copy rows straight out of a spreadsheet.

What happens next depends on the file. If the assistant recognizes a Homeschool-Life.com export, it already knows where every field lives, skips the mapping step, and takes you straight to the preview. Anything else goes through the mapping step below.

Reviewing the column mapping

For a file we don’t recognize, the assistant reads your column names and proposes where each one belongs, with a confidence level and a short note. You get a table of every column and can change any of them. The first option in each dropdown is skip this column, which is the right answer for anything that has no home in HomeschoolGo.

Student columns can go to first and last name, date of birth, gender, grade, allergies, medical notes, dietary restrictions, or a general notes field. Gender is only brought in by an import. It shows on the student’s record, but HomeschoolGo doesn’t ask for it anywhere else, so students added later won’t have it.

The mapping step reads only your column names and a small sample of rows, with phone numbers and email addresses stripped out of that sample first. The rest of your file stays in your co-op’s own storage. Homeschool-Life.com exports skip this step entirely, so nothing from those files is used this way at all.

Checking the preview

This is the screen worth slowing down on. You’ll see counts of the families and students found, and a table of the first 20 rows exactly as they’ll be saved. Nothing has been written yet.

Read any warnings above the table before you import. If the assistant couldn’t find your child columns from the header row, or a specific field like Grade or Birthdate is missing from them, it says so and tells you which students to spot-check. A warning about falling back to standard column positions is the important one. It means the file’s layout isn’t what was expected, which is exactly the situation that has produced a bad import before. Scan a few students in the preview and confirm the names look like names and the grades look like grades.

A few things are tidied up for you. If your sheet has one row per student, rows that share a parent email become one family with all of its children. A row of form labels (“Mother’s Name:”, “Address:”) or a repeated header row is skipped. An address typed into one box is split into street, city, state and zip when it reads clearly as a US address, and left as typed when it doesn’t. Grades like “4th grade” or “Junior - 11th grade” are saved as “4th” and “11th”.

If a parent’s whole name is in the first-name column with no last name, the preview lists it under “needs a quick look.” Those families still import, and you can add the last name in the Directory afterward.

When it looks right, click the import button. Families whose email already exists in your co-op are skipped automatically, so re-running a file won’t create everyone twice.

Inviting families afterward

Importing creates your families’ records. It does not email anyone. That part is deliberate, so you can tidy up the roster before your co-op hears from us.

When you’re ready, go to Admin › Settings › Import. Under the wizard you’ll find a card headed Imported families not set up yet, listing everyone who hasn’t finished setting up their account. You can send one invite at a time or select several and send them together.

A family clicks the link, signs in, and lands on a Verify your information page showing what you imported for them. They correct anything wrong and confirm, which is what takes them off this list. Someone who signed in but never finished that page stays on the list and gets a reminder to finish rather than a fresh invitation.

Families with no email address on file can’t be invited from here. Add an address in the Directory first, and they’ll appear as invitable.

Some imported families won’t be joining. To put them away, select them and click Archive, or use Archive all not signed in for everyone who never signed in. Archived families leave this list, the Families directory, and every email and text audience. Nothing is deleted. Find them under the directory’s withdrawn view, where Reactivate brings a family back. A family that has already signed in isn’t archived from here; withdraw it from the Families directory instead.

Common questions

Does it matter whether I import before or after opening a term?

Yes, and it affects money. Imported families are treated like a family whose application you just approved, which means they’re counted as already belonging to whichever term is open at the moment you import. If you import while a term is open, they skip that term’s review step and its join fee. If you import before opening any term, they’ll go through the normal review and pay whatever that term charges. Import first, then open the term, if you want them charged.

What gets created?

Families and their students, with contact details, addresses, and the student-level information your file carried. An import never creates classes, enrollments, charges, or payments, and nobody gets a login until you invite them.

Can I run it more than once?

Yes. Use Import another batch on the completed card. Duplicate families are skipped by email address, and Homeschool-Life.com files are checked on name and phone number too. A family with no email on file can’t be matched that way, so check for those before importing an overlapping file twice.

A family came in without their children.

Upload the same file again. A family that already exists from an earlier import but hasn’t been claimed by a parent yet gets its missing students added, and the results screen tells you how many were filled in. Children already on the record are matched on first name and birthdate, so nobody is duplicated, and a family a parent has already signed in and claimed is left untouched.

A family came in missing its phone number or address.

Fix the export and upload it again. The same re-upload that adds missing children also fills in blank family details: both phone numbers, the address, city, state and ZIP, the year they started homeschooling, and the short description. This works on either kind of file, a Homeschool-Life.com export or a spreadsheet you mapped yourself.

My export has renamed columns.

Homeschool-Life.com lets a co-op rename the standard export columns, and the common renamings are recognized — “Home Phone” and “Cell Phone” are read as phone numbers, for example. If a column the standard export normally carries can’t be matched to anything, the mapping step warns you rather than quietly importing that column blank. Check the preview against a family you know well before importing, and if a whole column looks empty there, fix the mapping first.

I closed the tab partway through.

Your progress is saved. A prompt to finish the import appears on your admin home until you complete or dismiss it, and reopening the assistant picks up where you stopped.

Something imported wrong.

If it’s a handful of families, editing them in the Directory is quickest. If a whole batch came in mangled, contact support rather than deleting family by family. We keep the rows from your upload briefly, which is what lets us work out what went wrong and put it right.