Students & families
Bulk roster import
Import staff, students, and guardians in the right order: what each importer matches on, what it does with a duplicate, and the sequence you cannot reverse.
Students & families guide for day and boarding schools.
Last updated August 29, 2026
Migration order is not a preference here, it is a dependency chain. Students cannot be imported until the classes they belong to exist, guardians cannot be imported until the students they point at exist, and teaching assignments cannot be made until both the staff and the subjects are in place. Getting the order wrong does not corrupt anything, but it produces a file where every row fails for the same reason, which is a slow way to learn the constraint.
The order
- Academic foundation: an active academic year, subjects, and every class section with its grade, section letter, stream where relevant, and seat capacity.
- Staff, from the bulk workbook on /school-staff. Rows are matched on email and updated if the person already exists, employee ids are checked for uniqueness, and each role name must already exist in the role catalogue.
- Students, from the CSV or Excel import on /students. Up to 500 rows per upload, each matched to an active class by grade and section, plus stream for grades eleven and twelve.
- Guardians, from the bulk workbook on /parents. Each row names its student by registration number or student email, so the student file has to be in first.
- Portal logins for the guardians who need them, one at a time from the guardian record. The import does not create them.
- Teaching assignments and the timetable, once the staff and subjects are settled.
What each importer matches on
| File | Matched on | Existing record | Rejected rows |
|---|---|---|---|
| Staff | Email address | Updated in place | Duplicate employee id; a role name not in the catalogue. |
| Students | Email address | Reported as already existing; never merged | No active class for the grade and section; a roll number already used in that grade and section; a registration number already in use, which surfaces as a raw database error on the row. |
| Guardians | Student plus phone number | Updated in place | No student found for the registration number or email; the student is inactive. |
Common questions
Quick answers in plain language.
What does the student importer do with a duplicate registration number?+
Nothing helpful. It checks the email address and the roll number within the grade and section, but it does not check the registration number at all. Because that column is unique across the whole user table, the second row simply fails at the database and comes back as a row-level error on that line while the rest of the file imports. De-duplicate registration numbers in the spreadsheet before uploading.
Do the importers update existing records or only create new ones?+
It depends on the importer. Staff match on email and are updated in place. Guardians match on student plus phone number and are updated in place. Students and users only ever create: an existing email is skipped or reported as an error, never merged. So the student file is a one-shot per learner, and corrections have to be made in the interface.
Why does every row of my student file fail with "no active class found"?+
The importer looks for an active class matching the grade and the section exactly, plus the stream for grades eleven and twelve. If the sections have not been created at /classes, or the letters differ, every row is rejected. Build the classes first and download the template, which lists the active sections for reference.
Do the imports send anything to families?+
The user importer emails each new account its username and a temporary password. The student CSV importer generates a password but does not email anyone. The guardian importer creates no logins at all, so nothing is sent — portal invites are a separate, per-guardian step afterwards.
Related searches
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