Import appointments

In the calendar, click the appointment list . Click More and then select Import to import appointments from an Excel, CSV or ODS file. Alternatively, open the Options in the menu and click Import data > Appointments in the Data management section.

This process is analogous to the customer import (see section Import customers). Finish the field mapping, check the import preview and then start the import.

Please note the following points for the import of appointments:

• Customer reference: Appointments at existing customers have to be mapped to the respective customers during the import. Only in that case the schedule calculation works without any problems and the call reports will be matched to the right customers. The mapping of an appointment to a customer works via the customer's Portatour ID or external ID.
• Time: The time of the appointment is set by using the three fields Earliest begin, Latest end and Duration in minutes, in which you can leave empty either Latest end or Duration. If you set all three fields and the duration is shorter than the time span between Earliest begin and Latest end, portatour® has leeway for the optimization. If you want to define an appointment as flexible on the day, set the Earliest begin to 12:00 a.m., the Latest end to 11:59 p.m. and the Duration to the desired appointment duration, e.g. 30 minutes. portatour® automatically takes your working hours and the customers' business hours into account.
• Address: For appointments with customer reference, the customer address will be automatically taken as appointment address during the import. You therefore just need to import addresses for appointments without customer reference (e.g. internal training) or for appointments taking place at another than the customer address. The addresses are automatically geocoded during the import.

Some hints for the import of appointments:

• Use the export of appointments to get a template of an import file. If you export your appointments as Excel file, you can edit them and import this file again. This allows mass editing of appointments.
• During the import, click on the blue (i) icon next to the field names to get explanations and hints for the import of each field.
• Also appointments taking a couple of days are possible, e.g. fairs or vacation. In this case, a leeway is not allowed. To simplify matters, leave the duration in minutes empty in those cases.
• Before each import, an automatic restore point is created. If an import does not lead to the desired result, go to Options. Under Data management > Restore you can reset your data to the status before the import, i.e. all data entries after that point will be discarded.