Import Your Existing Customers
What this does
If you already keep a customer list — in a spreadsheet, your booking system, or your old loyalty software — you can bring it into Passtastic instead of starting from zero.
Each person you import gets their own card and their own invite link. They tap the link, their card installs, and they carry on collecting from wherever you set them. Once someone has opened their link, it keeps working until the card is actually installed, so a customer who taps it and gets interrupted can come back to it later. An invite nobody opens expires with its code (72 hours by default) — invite them again from the Customers page.
Importing does not install cards on anyone's phone by itself. Only the customer can add a card to their own wallet — the import prepares each card and gives you a link to send.
Before you start
You'll need a file with one row per customer and a header row at the top. Both formats work:
- CSV (`.csv`)
- Excel (`.xlsx`)
Older Excel files (`.xls`) aren't supported — open the file in Excel and use File → Save As to save it as `.xlsx` or CSV UTF-8 first.
Your columns can be named anything sensible — Passtastic matches common names automatically, and you can correct the matching by hand in the next step. A typical file looks like this:
| Name | Phone | |
|---|---|---|
| Ana Novak | ana@example.com | +61 400 000 001 |
| Ben Carter | ben@example.com | +61 400 000 002 |
Each row needs at least an email or a phone number. Rows with neither are skipped and shown to you before anything is saved.
If your export starts with a title row or a "generated on" date above the real header, that's fine for Excel files — Passtastic looks for the row that actually holds your column names.
Step 1: Upload the file
1. Open Customers in the sidebar and click Import Customers.
2. Choose the program the customers should join.
3. Drop your file onto the upload box, or click it to browse.
If the file can't be read, you'll get a message saying why — wrong file type, an older `.xls`, or no usable rows — and nothing is imported.
Step 2: Match your columns
Passtastic matches your columns to Name, Email, Phone and a balance column automatically. Check each one and correct anything it got wrong using the dropdowns.
The balance column follows your card type. For stamp cards, the column is called Stamps — enter each customer's current number of stamps. If a value is higher than your card's stamp goal, it will be capped at the goal. For point cards, the column is Points / Balance. Membership cards don't have a balance column to map.
If your file splits first and last name into two columns, map both — they're joined into a single name.
Set anything you don't want brought over to Do not import.
Step 3: Review
You'll see how many rows are valid and how many have problems, with the reason for each. Fix the file and re-upload if you want to correct them, or carry on — rows with errors are skipped, not imported half-finished.
Step 4: Import and invite
Tick the confirmation that these are your existing customers and that you're allowed to message them about their loyalty card. This is required — it's your record that you have a genuine relationship with the people on the list.
Then choose how to send:
- Start import — imports everyone and sends their invite straight away, by email, SMS, or both, depending on the channels you picked.
- Import only — invite later — imports everyone without sending anything. Use this when you want to check the list first, or send invites at a specific time.
You can invite later at any point from the Customers page, either everyone who hasn't been invited yet or a selected few. You can also copy one customer's invite message and send it through your own channel.
Cards with a welcome coupon: imported customers don't get the welcome coupon by default — they join as regular members with their stamps, since they're existing customers. If you want imported customers to receive the welcome coupon too, turn on Give imported customers the welcome coupon in the last step of the import.
Which card types can be imported
Most programs can be imported into, including Memberships you issue yourself.
Bundles and Store credit can't be imported. Those cards carry a balance — visits or money — and a spreadsheet can't say reliably whether "50" means fifty visits, fifty points or fifty euros. Getting it wrong would hand out real value by mistake, so they're issued with activation codes instead. See Selling Bundles, Store Credit & Memberships Yourself.
Programs you can't import into simply won't appear in the list when you open Import Customers.