Help · Moving data

Import clients and projects

A second kind of import: the structure, without the hours. Useful at the start, when you know your clients and projects but not a single timesheet entry.

Where it is

Import → the Clients & Projects tab. The other tab is for time entries, and the two are deliberately separate because they need different columns.

The columns

Only a project name is strictly required. Everything else is optional:

• client also accepts company, customer or contact. Leave it out and the project goes under a placeholder you can rename.
• project also accepts matter, stage, campaign or job, since different industries call it different things.
• rate the billable hourly rate.
• budget hours, or budget hours. Accepts a plain number or something like 40h.
• tasks separate several with a pipe character, like Design | Build | Handover.

It fills gaps, it does not overwrite

Matching is case insensitive, so importing acme / website finds Acme / Website. If a project already exists, its rate and budget are left alone, and only genuinely new things are created. A rate of zero gets filled in, a real rate does not get replaced.

That makes the same file safe to import twice, and safe to keep as a living list you top up as you add clients.

There is no team member import

owntime has clients, projects and tasks. It has no users, because the model is one file per person rather than a shared timesheet. If your old system had staff records, this import will not recreate them, and it will not pretend to.

Afterwards

Set the cost rate on each project if you want the margin view to mean anything. It is the one field a CSV usually cannot know.

Next: importing time entries · rates · reports