Personio gives you the option to transfer various pieces of data into your Personio account. This article explains how to do imports in Personio.

The following imports are available:

• Importing employee data
• Importing salaries
• Importing absences
• Importing attendance data
• Importing documents
• Importing candidate data

Only employees with administrator rights can perform imports, with the exception of document imports. These can be performed by any role, provided the role has been assigned the necessary access rights. For more information on employee roles and access rights, please read our Help Center article Creating and Managing Employee Roles.

Uploading a File

To import data into Personio, go to Imports. The first step is to select the type of the import. In this example, we select the file type Employee bulk upload. Now click on Select file and select the Excel file with the employee data that you would like to import. Click Next to continue.

Configuring the Columns

In the second step, you need to allocate the contents of your imported file to the corresponding attributes in Personio. The left column reflects the titles of your columns in Excel. Now assign the corresponding Personio attributes to these by selecting from the dropdown options in the right column.

To make the allocation most efficient, the attributes in your Excel file should have names equivalent to those in Personio. Personio can then perform the allocation automatically, based on the identical names.

If there is an empty column in your Excel file or an attribute for which an equivalent Personio attribute doesn't exist, select the option Ignore from the dropdown. The attribute will then be ignored by Personio and not imported.

Once you have assigned all attributes, click Next.

Import Preview 

In the last step, a preview of your import is displayed. It shows which employees will be newly added, which will have their data updated, and which cannot be imported due to a missing unique attribute.

In Personio, the email address is always used as the unique ID. Therefore, you need to make sure it is included when importing employee data.

Once an import has been successfully completed, a status message is displayed:

The status message may differ with imports other than the employee data import.

Correcting the Import File

This function is only available with the employee data import. For detailed information on possible errors during the employee data import and also during other data imports, and how to solve them, read our Help Center article Why is the Import not Working?

If the import file for the employee data import has errors, the import is aborted and a revision file offered for download. 

In the revision file, errors are identified in red, including details on the value expected by Personio. This is always displayed in the language version that you are using. 

Since the revision file has exactly the same structure as your original import file, you can fix the errors directly in the revision file and then re-import it. 

To do this, start from the beginning and choose the revision file for your upload.