How to upload your Membership List

You only need to do this once for your first year setup.
But you may also want to update members in bulk at other times.

There is a Member Spreadsheet report which produces a comma separated file (CSV) which you can read in Excel or any spreadsheet program.
There is also an Upload Member Spreadsheet feature which does the opposite.

So, if you are preparing your system for first use, you should enter yourself into the system via the add link at the bottom of the search results from the check-in page.
Then, download the Member Spreadsheet and you will have the format to work with - DO NOT CHANGE THE COLUMNS. You can also download and save the spreadsheet as a backup.

For new rows, many of the columns may be ignored since they are just reporting useful data for the current year. The first columns id ... business are used to update existing members and add new ones. The remaining columns can be used for sorting or ignored.

The id column at the far left is particularly important - you cannot change these numbers, but you may find i useful to use the spreadsheet to assign paddle numbers as an alternative to assigning member paddles one at a time via the check-in page.

Also for new members, at least the phone number and name are required. The address is optional. If you have a source spreadsheet with individual fields, you can use a formula to combine those fields into the address (In Excel || combines values) - just be sure the save the result as a CSV so that the values, not the formula, get saved. Similarly, If you have multiple emails, combine them into a single commas separated value.

You can either do a single entry for each person or combine them (Joe & Jane Smith as one name) but I suggest you don't need to include kids. The idea is that when someone walks up to the registration table it's easier to pick their name from a list than take time to enter it in, plus if you have all the emails up front it enables the mass-email feature for you to use. (By default emails go to just 'participants' i.e. those with statements that have either donations or purchases or both, but you can override that and send a note to 'everyone'. There's no opt in/out feature (other than just erasing someone's email in their contact screen).

If you prefer to use the auto-assign paddle feature, set the 'business' column to true and it will skip giving paddle numbers to those members.

NEW - I've protected the added the ability to remove members in bulk with a checkbox you have to check now. So now you can upload only the rows you want to update as long as you don't check that allow-deletes box. Otherwise, you need to upload the entire file, only removing the rows you don't want to keep. Any members that are eligible for removal (no items, no purchases or payments) that don't occur in the list (and it is based on id, not name) will be removed.

You can sort the file however you like, but don't re-arrange columns A-H.

NEW - You can use your member spreadsheet to more easily scan members and mark the ones that are business or inactive/deceased with TRUE in the appropriate columns, and when you upload it will apply all the changes. Be careful so you apply the right spreadsheet - don't keep old ones around!