Importing Bookings

You can bring existing bookings in from a spreadsheet — typically when you are moving from another system, or from a diary. Click Import on the sidebar of the calendar, or access it via the Import icon in the navigation bar.

Before you start

Your customers, rooms, extras and price lists must already exist, because a booking refers to them by name. Import your customers first if you have not already.

If you are bringing in data from an old system, you might want to create some custom fields to store any values which do not have a home within MyHallWizard.

1. Choose a file

Drag your file in, or click to browse for it.

We accept:

Excel — .xlsx
OpenDocument — .ods (LibreOffice, OpenOffice)
CSV and tab-separated files, whatever separator or encoding they use

Up to 5,000 rows at a time.

If your workbook has more than one sheet, we will ask which one to use.

You can download a template spreadsheet here. Use this to add your data. Remember to delete row 2, which has guidance instructions, before importing.

2. Map your columns

We show you every column in your file and what we think it is. Change any of them, and set anything we did not recognise.

You do not have to rename your columns to match ours. If your spreadsheet says Organisation where we say Customer, just point it at the right field here.

3. Check your data

This is the part that makes the difference. Every row is shown in a grid, with anything we could not understand highlighted.

Click a cell to see what is wrong with it, and type over it to put it right.
Where we recognise what you probably meant — a misspelt price list, say — we offer it as a button. One click and it is fixed.
Skip a row you do not want, and the rest will still import.
The counts at the top let you show only the rows that need attention.

Your corrections are saved as you make them. You can leave this page and come back to it later; the import will be waiting.

4. Import

Press Import. We will tell you how many customers were created.

If anything went wrong, the rows that failed are still there with the reason against them.

Dates and times

Write them however your spreadsheet writes them. We accept real dates, 31/01/2026, 2026-01-31, 31 Jan 2026 and more, and times as 19:00, 7pm, 1900 or a real time.

Two things worth knowing:

Ambiguous dates. 03/04/2026 could be March or April. We read it the way your venue's region does and show you the date we settled on at step 3, so you can check before importing.
Bookings that run past midnight. Put the following day in the End date column. A booking from 22:00 to 02:00 with no end date looks like it ends before it starts, and we will flag it.

We only accept bookings from 2019 onwards.

Rooms and extras

If you are booking several rooms or several extras, separate them with commas: Main Hall, Kitchen.

If one of your rooms has a comma in its name, we try the whole cell as a single name first, so it still works. A semicolon or a vertical bar can be used as the separator instead.

Prices

What you want	What to put
Worked out from a price list	The price list's name in Price list, and leave Price empty
A price you agreed	The figure in Price, and leave Price list empty
A free booking	`0` in Price
Never invoice this	`Yes` in Do not invoice

A price of 0 means the booking was free. It used to be the only way to stop a booking being invoiced, and that advice is no longer right — see below.

Bookings you have already invoiced elsewhere

If you are moving from another system, your old bookings were probably invoiced there. You do not want MyHallWizard invoicing them again, but you do want their real prices, or every revenue and room-usage figure over your imported data will under-report for ever.

So: tick "These bookings have already been invoiced elsewhere" at step 2, and give the real prices. The bookings keep their price, show it everywhere, and are never offered for invoicing in MyHallWizard. You can also do it row by row with an Already invoiced elsewhere column, which wins over the tick box for the rows that use it.

Double bookings

At step 3 we check every booking against the ones you already have and against the others in your file, and flag anything that would double-book a room. The message names the row or the booking it clashes with, so you can go and look.

Fix the time or the room, or skip the row. Skipping either row of a clashing pair clears it.

For future bookings only, we also consider the buffer period and minimum booking duration you have configured in Calendar settings. We do not apply these for past bookings, as your old system may have had different rules set up.

Repeat bookings

Repeating bookings cannot be imported. Import them as individual bookings, or set the repeat up manually.

The columns we recognise

Column	Notes
Customer	Required. Must already exist.
Name	Required. The name of the event.
Booking date	Required.
From, To	Required.
End date	Only for bookings that run past midnight or over several days.
Rooms	Required. Separate several with commas.
Extras
Attendees
Status	Confirmed or Provisional.
Privacy	Public or Private.
Details, Admin notes	Admin notes are never shown to customers.
Price, Price list	See above.
Do not invoice	Yes/No.
Already invoiced elsewhere	Yes/No.
P.O. number
Your own custom fields	By their name or their identifier.

A Bookings Export file can be imported straight back in, with no mapping needed.

Undoing an import

Click on the Import icon in the navigation bar to see what you have imported.

An import can be undone for 30 days, which removes the bookings it created. It is all or nothing: if any of them has been invoiced or edited, nothing is removed and we tell you which ones stopped it.

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