Import your data from a spreadsheet

Moving off spreadsheets doesn't mean re-typing years of gigs. ArtistHQ can read your existing shows, contacts, crew and money straight from a CSV (or a phone-exported vCard), and it shows you a full preview before a single row is saved.

Where to start

Pick Import from CSV during onboarding, or open the importer any time from Dashboard → Import data from CSV. You'll see four cards, each its own importer:

• Shows — tour dates, fees, settlements
• Contacts — promoters, agents, venues, press
• Crew — techs, drivers, day rates
• Money — a bank or card statement

Before you upload, use the Download CSV link on the importer's first step to grab the template. Its column names are the ones ArtistHQ recognises, so if you paste your data under those headers the mapping is done for you.

The same four steps everywhere

1. Upload your file (drag-and-drop or browse).
2. Confirm column mapping. ArtistHQ auto-detects which of your columns is the date, the venue, the amount, and so on. Required fields are marked, and you can't continue until they're mapped — pick the right column from the dropdown if a guess is off.
3. Preview. You get a plain count of what will import, what's being skipped (rows missing a required field), and what looks like a duplicate.
4. Confirm. Nothing is written to your account until you click confirm on this step.

What each importer needs

• Shows need a date, venue and city at minimum; fee, currency, status and payment status are optional. Status words are understood generously — "booked", "pending", "played" and similar map to the right stage. One thing it won't do is import a show as settled: bring the history in as completed, then run the settlement inside ArtistHQ so the numbers stay real.
• Contacts need only a name. You can also drop in a .vcf vCard (the format your phone or address book exports) — those map one-to-one, so there's no column step.
• Crew need a name; role, day rate and currency are optional.
• Money takes a bank or card statement. It works with either a separate Debit and Credit column, or a single signed Amount column. On the mapping step you also choose the statement's currency and, for a single Amount column, whether a negative number means money out (bank) or a positive number means a charge (credit card). Each row lands as income or an expense.

What it handles for you

ArtistHQ auto-detects comma, semicolon and tab delimiters, reads both day-month and month-day dates, strips currency symbols and thousands separators, and copes with common file encodings. It flags likely duplicates — both repeats inside your file and rows that already exist in your account — and leaves them out by default, with an import anyway toggle on any you want to keep.

A couple of practical limits: the shows importer caps a file at 1,000 rows (about 5 MB), and contact and crew imports still respect your plan's limits. A tidy order is contacts and crew first, then shows, then money.

New here? Start with getting started for the ten-minute setup.