Import Partners, Contacts and Deal Registrations

Moving to Fours from another PRM, or from a spreadsheet? Bring your partners, the people you work with at them, and your deal history across in one upload, instead of adding them one by one.

Overview

Import Data, under Partners → Settings, takes a spreadsheet with up to three kinds of record:

Sheet	What each row becomes
Partnerships	A partner, identified by its company domain. A new partner gets an `ACTIVE` partnership and a Fours organization with no members, so nobody at the partner is invited or emailed.
Contacts	A person at one of your partners, added to that partner’s contacts. Nobody is emailed.
Deal registrations	A deal with one of your partners, open or already closed, recorded at the stage and registration date you give it. No commission is created and no partner is notified.

Fours checks every row before you submit, and approves each import before anything is added. Your partner list doesn’t change until then.

Step 1: Download Your Template

Go to Fours Console, then Partners.
Click Settings at the bottom of the rail, then Import Data.
Click Download template.

The template is an Excel workbook built for your organization. It has an Instructions sheet, one sheet each for Partnerships, Contacts, and Deal registrations, and an Allowed Values sheet that feeds the dropdowns in the picklist columns, so a wrong value is caught while you type. Your own tiers, your teammates, and your deal registration form shape it: a deal column your form hides from everyone is left out, and one it requires is marked required.

Step 2: Fill In the Sheets

Fill in any of the three sheets, or any combination, and leave a sheet empty to skip it. Columns marked * are required. Dates are YYYY-MM-DD, and a cell that takes several values separates them with ;. ID, phone, and postal-code columns are stored as text, so Excel keeps leading zeros.

Partnerships: partner_name and partner_domain, such as acmecloud.com, are required. The optional columns are the partner type, engagement type, relationship, tier, partner_manager_email (a teammate in your Fours organization), the date you started partnering, channels, city, country, and the partner’s CRM account, as crm_provider together with crm_account_id.
Contacts: partner_domain, email, first_name, and last_name are required; title, phone, LinkedIn URL, and role are optional.
Deal registrations: partner_domain, the deal name, stage, close date, opportunity type, deal value, and customer company are required, plus whatever else your deal registration form requires. deal_role is your role on the deal, and is Seller when left blank. crm_opportunity_id identifies a deal, so uploading the same ID again never creates a second one. registration_date records when the deal was registered, and closed_lost_reason applies only to a lost deal. The owner on your side comes from isv_owner_name and isv_owner_email; left blank, it’s you.

Contacts and deals name their partner by partner_domain: one of your active partners, or a partner in the Partnerships sheet of the same upload. Each sheet takes up to 1,000 rows.

Step 3: Upload and Check the Preview

Under Upload your file, choose the workbook (.xlsx), or a .csv holding one sheet with the template’s headers.
Fours checks every row and saves nothing yet. The badges count each sheet’s rows as new, existing, or invalid, and a table lists the rows to look at, by sheet, row number, and record, with the issue.
Fix each invalid row in your file and upload it again.

A row with a warning, such as a closed deal that leaves out a field your deal registration form requires, doesn’t block the import; on an open deal, the same gap makes the row invalid. These rows are invalid too:

A domain that can’t be a partner: your own organization’s domain, or a personal email provider such as Gmail.
A domain Fours can’t place: one that belongs to another customer’s Fours organization, or matches more than one organization.
A partner you deactivated. An upload doesn’t undo that decision: reactivate the partner first.
A contact or deal for a partner that isn’t active, unless the same upload’s Partnerships sheet has a row for it. A Partnerships row is the only way an import makes a suggested or pending partner ACTIVE.
A duplicate: the same partner twice in Partnerships, the same email twice for one partner, or the same deal twice.

Step 4: Submit It for Approval

When no row is invalid, click Submit for approval. The import appears under History, with who submitted it, its counts, and its status, and Fours reviews it. You can submit one import at a time: while one waits for approval, the upload is closed.

Fours approves the whole import, or leaves out rows, each with a reason you’ll see. Leaving out a partner leaves out its contacts and deals too. Once approved, the import runs:

Partners. Each one is linked to a Fours organization for its domain, or gets a new one with no members. A partner you already have keeps what it has: the import only fills in fields that are empty.
Contacts are added to the partner’s contacts, the same way as adding one by hand. Someone already there is left as they are.
Deals are recorded silently, at their stage and registration date, with no commission and no notifications.

Click Details on an import in History to see what happened to each row: Created, Existing, Excluded, or Failed, with the reason. A rejected import shows why Fours didn’t approve it, and nothing from it is added.

Spotted something wrong or out of date on this page? Tell us and we'll correct it.