Moving your customer list out of a spreadsheet (or WhatsApp) without losing anything

Your customer list probably lives in three places: an Excel sheet you started in 2019, the contacts in your phone, and the WhatsApp chats where half your quotes were agreed. Moving it into a proper system feels like a weekend job, so it keeps getting put off. It’s really an hour of tidying, if you do it in the right order.

Step 1: Decide what is actually worth keeping

Don’t import everything. Ask of each person: have I done business with them, or are they likely to hire me? Old suppliers, the school WhatsApp group and your cousin’s number can stay in your phone.

There’s a legal reason for this as well as a practical one. POPIA’s minimality rule (section 10) says personal information may only be processed if, for the purpose, it is “adequate, relevant and not excessive”. A list of your customers is fine. A list of everyone you’ve ever met is harder to defend.

Step 2: Pick the columns you need, and no more

For a service business, these cover almost everything:

Keep	Why
Name and surname	Separate columns make life easier for sorting and greetings
Mobile number	How you actually reach people
Email	Needed to send quotes and invoices
Company	If you do work for businesses
Address	The job location, in one cell
Notes	Gate code, dog in the yard, “prefers WhatsApp”

Skip the birthday and the “relationship” column. Every extra field is one more thing to keep accurate, and one more piece of personal information you’re responsible for.

Step 3: Clean the list

Do this once, in a spreadsheet, before you import anything. Twenty minutes here saves hours later.

Split the names. If you have “Thandi Mokoena” in a single cell, split it into two with Excel’s Text to Columns (Data tab, then Delimited, then Space). Check the odd ones by eye: “Van der Merwe”, “De Villiers” and double-barrelled surnames will split wrongly.

Fix the phone numbers. South African numbers turn up as 082 555 0100, 0825550100, +27 82 555 0100, 27825550100 and (082) 555-0100. Pick one format and stick to it. The safest is the international form, +27 82 555 0100: drop the leading 0 and add +27. It works from anywhere, and it’s what WhatsApp links need. Remove spaces and brackets if the import tool prefers digits only.

Watch out for Excel eating the leading zero. If you type 0825550100 into a cell that Excel thinks is a number, it keeps 825550100. Format the phone column as Text before you type or paste, or use the +27 form, which Excel keeps intact.

Remove duplicates. In Excel, select the sheet and use Data, then Remove Duplicates, ticking the phone and email columns (not the name, because “John Smith” is two different people). In Google Contacts, open Merge & fix in the left menu and accept the suggested merges; Google’s help page has the steps, and notes it can’t merge contacts saved in different Google accounts.

Step 4: Export from wherever the contacts are

Excel or Google Sheets. Use Save As and choose CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited). The UTF-8 part keeps names like “Nomvula Ndlovu-Zulu” and “Sönke” intact. In Sheets it’s File, Download, Comma-separated values.

Google Contacts (most Android phones). Select the contacts, then More actions, then Export, and choose Google CSV. The steps are in Google’s help. Your phone’s contacts live here if you’ve got sync switched on.

iPhone. Apple doesn’t export CSV directly. Go to icloud.com/contacts, select the contacts, click the Share button and choose Export vCard (Apple’s steps). You can then import that vCard into Google Contacts and export it from there as a CSV.

WhatsApp. There is no “export my contacts” in WhatsApp; the numbers come from your phone’s contact list, so export from there. The chats themselves are different. Quote amounts, addresses and job notes agreed in a chat won’t come across by themselves. For your last twenty or thirty active customers, copy the useful bits into the Notes column by hand. It’s tedious, and it’s also the most valuable part of the exercise.

Step 5: Keep the original file

Don’t delete the spreadsheet after the import. Save it somewhere safe for a few weeks. If something looks off, you can compare against it. After that, delete it, because an old copy of your customers’ phone numbers sitting on a laptop is the sort of thing POPIA expects you to look after.

Bringing it into Boetbook

On the Clients page, tap Import CSV and choose your file. Boetbook guesses which column is which and shows each one with a sample value and a dropdown (Name, Surname, Phone, Email, Company and so on), so you can correct a guess or choose “Don’t import”. Because you match the columns yourself, your spreadsheet doesn’t need to be in any particular order or have particular headings. Before anything is saved you see how many rows will come in and which will be skipped and why: a missing name, a broken email address, or someone who is already in your list with the same email or phone. Not sure how to lay the file out? Download the template from the same screen. The clean-up above is still worth doing first, because a tool can only import what’s in the file. The free plan holds up to 100 clients; the pricing page shows what the paid plans add. If you’d rather start small, add your first client by hand and import the rest later.

POPIA, in plain English

You don’t need a lawyer to run a customer list, but you do need to know four things. They come straight from the Act (the full text is on gov.za); the Information Regulator enforces them.

You need a lawful reason to hold the data. Section 11 lists them. For customers, the usual ones are that it’s necessary to carry out a contract with them (quoting, doing the job, invoicing them), or that it serves your legitimate interests. You don’t need to ask a customer’s permission to keep their number so you can invoice them.
Collect only what you need, and keep it accurate. See Step 2.
Marketing is a separate matter. Under section 69, sending marketing by email, SMS or other electronic message is prohibited unless the person has consented, or is your customer. For customers you may only market your own similar products or services, only if you got their details when selling to them, and only if they had a chance to say no, free of charge, when you collected their details and in every message. Every marketing message must say who it’s from and give an address to send a “stop” request to.
People who aren’t customers need to opt in. You may ask a non-customer for consent once, and if they say no or ignore you, that’s the end of it. Mailing your whole phone book “to let them know you’re open for business” is exactly what the Regulator has taken action on: it has issued an enforcement notice over repeated marketing emails sent without consent.

Sending a customer their quote, invoice or “your appointment is tomorrow” is service communication, not marketing, and doesn’t need an opt-in. The moment the message says “10% off this month”, it’s marketing.

This is general information, not legal advice. If you’re doing anything more complicated than a customer list and the odd reminder, ask a professional.

A ten-minute checklist

Decide who stays and who goes
Keep only the columns in the table above
Split names, convert phones to +27, format the phone column as Text
Remove duplicates by phone and email
Export as CSV UTF-8 (or Google CSV from Google Contacts)
Copy key notes from WhatsApp for your active customers
Import, spot-check ten records, and keep the original file for a few weeks