From HoneyBook, Dubsado, Flodesk, Mailchimp, Studio Ninja, or a spreadsheet you’ve kept for eleven years. It’s the same job either way.
This is the first thing most people do, and it’s the bit that feels riskiest — years of client history, and you’re about to move it somewhere new.
So the important thing first: nothing imports until you say so. You choose the file, you see how many rows were found, you match up the columns, and only then does anything get added. If it looks wrong at that point, close the window and nothing has happened.
Every tool worth using can export a CSV. It’s usually somewhere unglamorous — look for Export, Download, or Data under settings, contacts, or your account area.
| Coming from | Where to look |
|---|---|
| HoneyBook | Contacts, then export |
| Dubsado | Clients, then export to CSV |
| Flodesk / Mailchimp | Audience or subscribers, then export |
| Google Contacts | Export, choosing Google CSV |
| A spreadsheet | File → Download → comma separated values |
You don’t need to tidy it first. Odd column names, columns you don’t care about, dates in an American order — all fine. That’s what the matching step is for.
One thing worth doing. Open the file and glance at the first few rows. Not to fix anything — just so you recognise it when you’re matching columns in a minute. It takes ten seconds and makes the next step much less puzzling.
In MSB, go to Clients and choose Import clients from CSV. Pick your file and it’ll tell you how many rows it found.
Then you match up: this column in my file is that field in MSB. It guesses where it can — a column called “Email Address” will already be lined up with Email. Anything you don’t want, leave on skip.
Birthdays are worth a moment. MSB will read almost any format — 1990-04-06, 4/6/1990, 6 April 1990 — and tidy them up as it goes. Bring them across if you have them: MSB will tell you when a client’s birthday is coming up, and that’s one of the easiest bookings you’ll ever get.
Small tick boxes, and they matter more than they look.
Tick this and everyone in the file becomes a newsletter subscriber. Think before you do, because this is the one with consequences: only tick it for people who actually agreed to hear from you. Past clients, yes. A list of cold leads you bought or scraped, no — that’s how you end up in spam folders and it’s hard to come back from.
Matches on email. Instead of skipping someone who’s already in MSB, it fills in the blanks — a birthday you didn’t have, a phone number, a partner’s name. Useful when you’re importing a second file from a different source and want the two merged rather than duplicated.
Type one or more, separated by commas. Each becomes an audience you can send a newsletter to on its own.
This is the one people wish they’d used. Import your Flodesk list tagged newsletter-only, your past clients tagged past-clients-2024, and your workshop attendees tagged education — and from then on you can write to exactly the right people instead of everyone at once.
If you run more than one brand, this keeps the import tied to one of them. Handy when your photographer list and your client list want to stay firmly apart.
The instinct is to get everything in with one enormous file. Don’t.
Import your past clients first, tagged as past clients. Then your newsletter list, tagged separately. Then your current enquiries. Three smaller imports take the same total time, and you end up with tags that mean something instead of one undifferentiated pile of two thousand names.
If something went wrong, the fix is usually to delete the affected clients and re-import with the columns matched differently. Not elegant, but quick — and better than living with a thousand records where the partner’s name is in the notes field.
Contacts come across. History doesn’t.
Past invoices, old contracts, previous sessions, galleries you delivered in 2022 — those stay in your old system, and no CSV will carry them. That’s true of every CRM move, not just this one.
Which means: don’t cancel your old subscription the day you import. Keep it, or export a PDF of anything you might need — signed contracts especially — before you close the account. Give yourself a season of overlap. It costs one more month and it saves the specific panic of needing a signed agreement you can no longer reach.
Next: how workflows work — worth reading once your clients are in and you’re wondering what to do with them.
Stuck? Ask in the community. Import questions are always worth asking out loud, because someone else is coming from the same system you are. 🤍