What an import writes

The wizard offers 64 fields across six record types. The saves behind it write 41 of them. This page is the difference, field by field, plus what gets invented when your file leaves a field blank, and what a revert can put back afterward.

How to read the tables

Column	Meaning
Offered	The field appears on the matching screen, in the downloadable template, and in the preview
Written	The save reads the matched value and puts it on the new record
Discarded	The field is offered, matched and previewed, and the save never reads it

A discarded field is not treated as an error and produces no warning. It still appears in the preview with your own data in it.

Members: 18 offered, 12 written, 6 discarded

Field	Required	Written?	Note
First Name	Yes	Yes	Missing or blank fails the row
Last Name	Yes	Yes
Date Of Birth	Yes	Yes	Read as month, day, year, in that order, the way the template shows it
Gender	No	Yes	A value PTRS does not recognise falls back to "prefer not to say," without a warning
Grade	No	Yes
School	No	Yes
Address	No	Yes
City	No	Yes
State	No	Yes
Zip Code	No	Yes
Allergies	No	Yes	Kept as a single entry rather than split apart, so the whole cell, commas included, becomes one allergy
Medical Notes	No	Yes	Kept the same way
Guardian First Name	No	No
Guardian Last Name	No	No
Guardian Phone	No	No
Guardian Email	No	No
Emergency Contact Name	No	No
Emergency Contact Phone	No	No

The six discarded fields are the whole guardian and emergency-contact block. No guardian record is ever created by an import, and an imported child has no emergency contact at all. The record-type picker describes this import as bringing in child profiles, guardian contacts and emergency information.

What gets invented when the file is silent: the enrolment date is set to today. The site is never set at all: the save takes a site as a parameter and does not actually use it.

Staff: 12 offered, 6 written, 6 discarded

Field	Required	Written?	Note
First Name	Yes	Yes
Last Name	Yes	Yes
Email	Yes	Yes	Also what a duplicate is matched on
Phone	No	Yes
Role	No	Yes	Anything PTRS does not recognise becomes a plain staff role
Hire Date	No	Yes	Defaults to today
CPR Cert Date	No	No
CPR Exp Date	No	No
First Aid Cert Date	No	No
First Aid Exp Date	No	No
Background Check Date	No	No
Background Check Status	No	No

The six discarded fields are every certification and the background check. No credential record and no background-check record is ever created by an import. The record-type picker describes this import as bringing in staff members, certifications and background checks.

What gets invented when the file is silent: a placeholder sign-in reference, with a note in the underlying save saying it still needs to be matched up properly. No sign-in account and no PTRS account record is created, so an imported staff member cannot sign in. See How a person becomes a PTRS user.

Programs: 9 offered, 7 written, 2 discarded

Field	Required	Written?	Note
Name	Yes	Yes	Also part of what a duplicate is matched on
Description	No	Yes
Start Date	Yes	Yes	Also part of the duplicate match
End Date	Yes	Yes
Capacity	No	Yes	Defaults to 30
Age Min	No	Yes	Defaults to 5
Age Max	No	Yes	Defaults to 18
Schedule	No	No	The template's own example reads "Mon-Fri 3:00-6:00 PM"
Location	No	No	The site comes from the import job itself, not from this column

What gets invented when the file is silent, and there is no column for any of it: every imported program is written as a workshop, running the school year, delivered in person, for a mixed age group, and starting in draft status. A migrated after-school programme arrives labelled a draft workshop regardless of what it actually is.

Attendance: 7 offered, 5 written, 2 discarded

Field	Required	Written?	Note
Member First Name	Yes	Yes	Used to find the child. Not itself stored
Member Last Name	Yes	Yes	Same
Date	Yes	Yes
Check In Time	No	Yes	A missing time becomes midnight, in universal time
Check Out Time	No	Yes
Program Name	No	No	The record is never linked to a program
Status	No	No	The template offers present, absent or excused. Every row becomes a check-in regardless

The child is matched by first and last name alone, without regard to case, taking whichever match comes first in the organisation. Two children sharing a name receive each other's attendance.

What gets invented when the file is silent: every row becomes a check-in, recorded as entered manually, with the recorder set to the first active staff account found at the site, in no particular order. If the site has no active staff at all, every row fails.

Meal counts: 7 offered, 6 written, 1 discarded

Field	Required	Written?	Note
Date	Yes	Yes
Meal Type	Yes	Yes	Breakfast, morning snack, lunch, afternoon snack, or supper
Total Served	Yes	Yes
Free Count	No	Yes	Defaults to zero
Reduced Count	No	Yes	Defaults to zero
Paid Count	No	Yes	Defaults to total served minus free minus reduced, which can come out negative
Location	No	No	The site comes from the import job itself

What gets invented when the file is silent: no menu items are recorded, and the recorder is set to the first active staff account at the site.

These are federal CACFP records. The import performs no eligibility check and no meal-pattern check of any kind. It writes the counts exactly as given.

Incidents: 11 offered, 5 written, 6 discarded

Field	Required	Written?	Note
Date	Yes	Yes
Time	No	Yes	An unreadable time silently becomes midnight
Category	Yes	Yes	An unrecognised value fails the row
Description	Yes	Yes
Action Taken	No	Yes
Member First Name	No	No	The incident is never linked to the child it happened to
Member Last Name	No	No
Staff First Name	No	No
Staff Last Name	No	No
Parent Notified	No	No
Follow Up Required	No	No

What gets invented when the file is silent, and there is no column for it at all: every row is recorded at the lowest severity on the scale. The reporting staff member is set to the first active staff account found at the site, never the person actually named in your own file.

Duplicate detection, by record type

Only three of the six saves check for a duplicate at all.

Record type	Matched on	Behaviour on a match
Member	First and last name, and date of birth, within the organisation	Skip, or merge
Staff	Email, within the organisation	Skip, or merge
Program	Name, start date, organisation and site	Skip, or merge
Attendance	Not applicable	None. Every row is created
Meal counts	Not applicable	None. Every row is created
Incidents	Not applicable	None. Every row is created

The three that never check for a duplicate ignore the choice on the Duplicates screen entirely. The screen's own merge description says this correctly: attendance, meals and incidents are always created new, because they are treated as unique events. In practice, this means running the same attendance, meal or incident file twice duplicates every row.

For the three that do check, the choice that actually runs is the one fixed at the moment you uploaded the file, not the one chosen later on the Duplicates screen itself. See the module landing page.

What a merge overwrites, and what a revert restores

A revert deletes every record the import created, outright, not hidden, just gone. For merged records, it restores from a copy taken before the merge happened, and that copy covers fewer fields than the merge itself changed.

Record type	Fields the merge overwrites	Fields the revert restores	Lost on revert
Member	Grade, school, address, city, state, postal code, gender, 7 fields	Grade, school, gender, 3 fields	Address, city, state, zip code
Staff	First name, last name, phone, role, 4 fields	The same 4 fields	None
Program	Description, capacity, minimum age, maximum age, end date, 5 fields	Capacity, 1 field	Description, minimum age, maximum age, end date

The revert confirmation describes deleting every newly created record and restoring every merged one to its original state. For staff, that is accurate. For members and programs, it is not.

Limits and formats

Limit	Value
Maximum file size	50 megabytes
Maximum rows	50,000
Accepted formats	Two common spreadsheet formats
Offered by the file picker	Those same two, plus an older format PTRS does not actually accept
Preview rows	20

The older format is offered by the picker and refused by the save behind it, with a message naming the two formats that do work.

Dates and times are read in a fixed, US-style order throughout, so a file using the day-first order common outside the US will silently produce wrong dates wherever the day is 12 or lower, and fail the row outright otherwise.

The job's own status values

An import job moves through nine distinct states as it runs. The screen's own copy of that list is missing two of the nine, and nothing ever actually checks for those two, so the gap has no visible effect.

A count of updated records is shown on both the summary screen and the revert confirmation, and nothing anywhere in PTRS ever assigns a value to it, so that particular figure always reads zero.