Importing your data

Most teams arrive at Nanobox with data already living somewhere else: a spreadsheet, an old CRM, an export from HubSpot or Pipedrive. Nanobox imports that data from plain CSV files straight into the Postgres database it runs on, so there's no proprietary format to convert and nothing locked behind an API. This guide covers the general flow. If you're moving off a specific tool, the migration guides walk through exporting from each one.

Prepare your CSV files

Export your records as CSV, one file per record type: contacts, companies, and deals. Keep a column with the original record's ID if you have one. It makes re-linking deals and notes to the right contacts much easier, and you can delete it after the import. Trim columns you'll never use; a narrow, clean CSV maps faster than a wide one full of analytics fields you won't carry over.

Map your fields

When you upload a CSV, Nanobox shows your columns next to the matching fields on the record type. Confirm the obvious ones (name, email, phone, amount, stage) and point any custom columns at the right destination. If a column doesn't have a home yet, you can create a custom field first (see Customizing fields and stages), then map to it. [TODO: confirm whether the importer can create new fields inline during mapping, or whether they must exist first.]

Deduplicate

Before committing the import, choose how Nanobox should handle records that already exist. Matching on a unique field (email for contacts, domain for companies) lets the importer update existing records instead of creating duplicates. [TODO: confirm the exact dedupe match keys and whether the default behavior is skip, update, or create-new.] When in doubt, import into a test instance first and review the result.

Import in dependency order

Order matters because records reference each other. Import companies first, then contacts linked to those companies, then deals that point at the right company and contact. If you import deals before the contacts exist, the associations won't resolve. Because the data lands in a database you own, a bad run isn't fatal: you can correct the CSV and re-import.

Verify

After importing, spot-check a sample of records: confirm a handful of deal amounts, stages, and company associations landed correctly. Check your total row counts against the source export. Once it looks right, you're done. If you'd rather not touch CSVs at all, our done-for-you launch handles the whole migration for you.