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BigWave has always had the ability to import customer sites.  The original importing process required the use of a spreadsheet with very strict column header names, only enabled the import of new sites (did not allow the update of existing sites with updated data), was not able to import custom fields, and required the user to wait several minutes on a background process to pick up the import and load the sites.

We now introduce a new and superior way to load your customer site data.  Some features of this are:

• Use any spreadsheet to upload your data.  No longer are you shackled to a strict format.  In most instances, a spreadsheet you receive from your customer may be uploaded with no modification or copying of data from one spreadsheet to another.
• Preview the upload.  If desired, BigWave can let you know the differences between your uploaded spreadsheet and the values in BigWave.  This preview feature shows exactly what will be uploaded/updated without actually modifying any data in the system.
• Update existing sites.  If you make a mistake and upload incorrect data, or you receive a spreadsheet with updated data, the BigWave information now can be updated from the spreadsheet.  This was not possible with the old site import process.
• Column mapping.  Now you can tell BigWave what columns from your spreadsheet to import.

Let’s walk through a quick example to demonstrate the functionality.

Say you have a spreadsheet that needs to be imported into BigWave.  It’s pretty simple and looks like the following:

To upload it, open the customer’s page by choosing from the menu ‘Manage Customers’

Choose the correct customer for which you are uploading site information, and choose the ‘Import/Export Center’ tab at the bottom of the screen.

Choose the ‘Import site information from Excel’ option, hit Next.

Specify your Excel file to upload, hit the Upload File(s) button.

On the next screen we are presented with all the available fields we can map.  BigWave makes an attempt to automap the column headers from the spreadsheet, but for those that aren’t mapped automatically, we must tell BigWave what to do.  In this case we will map Site Name to the ‘Site ID’  Excel column, and we will map Addr1 to the ‘Street’ Excel column.  We are only required to map Site ID.  All other fields are optional.

Notice we don’t import the ‘Install Date’ Excel column.  That will be used later when we create a project.  For now we are only importing customer site data and ‘Install Date’ isn’t needed.

The defaults on the import options are fine so we won’t change anything there.  Even though the ‘Create new contacts’ checkbox is selected, since we didn’t map those columns, no contacts will be added.

Hit the Next button and the import will commence immediately. 

Our import completed sucessfully.  If there were any issues during the upload process, BigWave will prepare a spreadsheet that may be downloaded and examined.  In it you will find detailed information about what the issues were.

That’s it, you have imported your sites!