How to Import Leads from a Spreadsheet into ASH

Most institutes have years of enquiries sitting in spreadsheets — walk-in registers, event lists, exports from an old tool. ASH imports them from a plain CSV, and because every imported row travels the same path as a manually added lead, de-duplication and assignment happen on their own. Here is how to do it cleanly.

Prepare the sheet

Save your file as CSV with the first row as a header. ASH reads these columns in any order and regardless of capitalisation: name, phone, email, company, city and tags. Only a name column is strictly required, though a phone number is what makes a lead reachable. Any row with neither a name nor a phone is skipped.

Mapping is automatic and forgiving

You do not have to rename columns to match ours. ASH recognises common variants — "mobile", "phone number", "whatsapp" and "contact" all map to phone; "full name" and "customer name" map to name; "organisation" maps to company. Tags in a single cell can be separated by a semicolon or a pipe, so scholarship;2026 batch becomes two tags. A preview shows the first few rows so you can confirm the mapping before committing.

Duplicates are caught for you

Re-importing the same list is a common worry. ASH fingerprints each lead on its normalised phone (the last ten digits) and lowercased email, so an enquiry you already hold is recognised rather than silently duplicated. Where a genuine duplicate does surface later, you can merge the two records — notes, tasks, activities and conversations move onto the primary lead, and nothing is lost.

Assignment happens on import

Imported leads are not left in a heap. If auto-distribution is on, ASH assigns each new lead as it lands — round-robin across your active team, or by course-interest routing where matching enquiries go to the counsellor who handles that programme. So a 2,000-row import arrives already split across the team instead of waiting for someone to divide it by hand.

Who can run an import

Importing is a controlled action tied to the import leads permission, which owners and managers hold by default. If you want a specific counsellor to run imports, grant it to them as an override rather than changing their whole role — see setting counsellor roles and permissions. For education teams, the same import works alongside the education CRM and its applicant fields.