Importing Contacts

Using the UI

In the UI, you can use the Add Contacts button within a ledger to add more contacts to that ledger. Alternatively, from the ledger list page you press Add Contacts on any ledger to add contacts to that ledger.

In any case, once you press the Add Contacts button you will be presented with an interface that allows you to manually enter data (usually if you just have a couple to add) or upload a file (CSV or Excel). After selecting your file, you will be provided step-by-step instructions for mapping the data fields from your file into Live Data.

Data Field Mapping

At a minimum, Live Data requires that you map the following fields:

Name (either separate fields for first name and last name, or one field with first and last combined)
Company

Additional contact fields can be mapped and will help our live lookup processes, though they’re not required. These include:

Title
LinkedIn URL
Email Address

The Reference ID Field

Additionally you should always map the Live Data Reference ID field to whatever unique key you have in your system of record for each contact. This will help ensure you do not add duplicate contacts to the same ledger and will make it easier for you to process changes in your system/

Post-Import Steps

Upon completion of the upload and mapping process, an Import Job is created to import the contacts into your ledger. The import process loads all of your contacts into the Live Data system and identifies any potential errors in the data, such as duplicate records. It also performs an initial check of each contact to identify them on the open web and get their current job information. An import job goes through a series of statuses as follows:

importing - Live Data is loading the contacts into your ledger. This usually takes only a few minutes.
processing - Live Data is checking each contact on the open web to get their latest information. This can take a few hours or longer for large imports.
completed - The initial check of the ledger contacts has been complete. The contacts are now continually being monitored for changes.

Now that your ledger is populated, Live Data will continually check the status of each person. On your ledger, the Last Changed At date represents the date at which Live Data last detected a job change for that person. You can use this date to filter the ledger view to only show contacts that have been updated within a specified period. Read more about ledgers and contacts in the ledgers section of the documentation.

Using the API

To upload contacts using the API, use the add contacts to ledger call in the API. For more information about the API, see the API documentation.