Part 4 — Reference · Chapter 24
Import / Export Reference
The complete reference for BigWave’s spreadsheet machinery. The narrative version, with the rollout playbook and the order to run things in, is chapter 22. This page is the lookup table.
Where the centers are
The Import / Export Center appears at five scopes, each offering the types that make sense there:
| Scope | Reached from | Typical cargo |
|---|---|---|
| Company | Setup, Import / Export Center | Customers, technicians, company contacts, materials |
| Customer | The customer screen | That customer’s sites and site data |
| Project | Project Setup | Work orders, schedules, assignments, pricing, custom field values |
| Asset type | The asset type screen | Assets of that type |
| Inventory | The Inventory screen | Stocked materials |
Import / export types
Every type below exists as an import, an export, or (usually) both. The matching export is also the sanctioned way to bulk-edit: export, change the spreadsheet, re-import.
Master data
- Customers: create or update customer records in bulk.
- Sites: locations under a customer, keyed by Site ID. The rollout workhorse.
- Technicians: your field roster.
- Company Contacts: internal people.
- Materials: the parts catalog, including supplier repricing round-trips (chapter 11).
Custom fields
- Custom Field Definitions: the field structures themselves, for standing up a customer’s required data dictionary at once (chapter 10).
- Custom Field Values: the data, per work order or site: three hundred gate codes in one upload.
Project operations
- Work Order Templates: template definitions across projects.
- Work Order Details: work order data in bulk, beyond what bulk-create covers.
- Schedule: schedule entries per work order (chapter 22, step 4).
- Assignments: technician placements onto scheduled entries (step 5).
- Pricing: line item pricing in bulk.
Assets and equipment
- Assets: register or update equipment at sites.
- Assets (generate): the generate-style import that creates assets in bulk from site data, useful when every site gets the same standard equipment set.
- GeoTab Devices: vehicle-tracking device mapping, for companies with the GeoTab integration.
Purchasing
- Supplier Purchase Orders: POs in bulk (chapter 21).
Anything else
- Grid export: every grid’s export-current-view, which is not a “type” you configure so much as the answer to most one-off data requests (chapter 3).
Mechanics common to every import
- Download the layout for the type from the center; column names matter, order does not.
- External IDs drive matching. Rows match existing records on your stable identifiers (Site ID, customer ID, part number). A matched row updates; an unmatched row creates. This is also why chapter 8 nagged about entering the customer’s own numbering.
- Review before commit. The center shows what it understood (creates, updates, problems) before anything is written. Read the problem rows; they are almost always an ID mismatch or a value that does not fit the field’s type.
- History is kept. Past runs are visible in the center, which is the first place to look when someone asks what changed last Tuesday. Administration of the centers (managing runs and cleanup) lives with the company-level center.
- Pilot first. Five rows, verify, then the real file. Chapter 22 said it; the reference repeats it because nobody has ever regretted the pilot.