Overview
We understand it can be tedious to continually update Employees and Roles on an individual basis. So, as a part of our recent updates for Cost Effective Rates, we've also added a feature for Downloading and Uploading CSV files in order to mass update your Employees and Roles. Check out below for more info!
Download CSV
This can be found at the top of both your Employees and Roles page, and allows you to get a CSV snapshot of your current Roles or Employees within Parallax. In addition to providing a moment in time for your Roles or Employees, this may be useful for scenario planning in order to make decision on upcoming Cost Rate changes, however, to get you to a Sheet that you can update, save and then upload to pull these changes to your Employees/Roles into Parallax using the CSV Upload function.
CSV Upload
*Important - CSV Uploads are Not Reversible (but you can fix the issue if one occurs)
It's important to keep in mind that there is no "undo" for a CSV Upload.
If a mistake was made, you can make correct the file and then Upload again to correct any changes made a by a previous Upload. Please note, the correction upload will not remove or delete any Cost Rates that were added on an incorrect Effective Date - those would have be manually deleted from each Employee or Role on the Settings > Roles or Settings > Employees page.
Always double-check your CSV file before Uploading! If you have an issue, please feel free to use the Contact Support link!
This is the big one - you can use the CSV you downloaded and edited to bulk import these updates to Existing Employees. Once you've downloaded the CSV from Parallax, you can edit the Employees or Roles you want to change, then use the CSV Upload to import those changes into Parallax.
It's important to keep in mind the following when doing this:
- Effective Rate currently only affects Cost Rate Changes - the Date you select will not apply to other Changes such as Role Change.
- CSV Uploads are to update an employee record's existing Employees/Roles - you cannot add or delete Employees or Roles using a CSV upload (this applies to Tags, too)
- There should never be duplicate IDs in a single upload. In other words, an employee can only be listed one time on the spreadsheet and not on multiple lines.
- CSV Uploads cannot be undone - so be careful! But, you can upload a new file if you make a mistake to correct the error.
If you want to make multiple Cost Rate changes with different Effective dates to an Employee or Rate, you'll want to Upload the first change, then make the Cost Rate/Effective Date change and Upload a second time. Effective Dates don't have to be entered in order, because Parallax will always put Effective Dates in chronological order (not the order they are entered).
Nothing changed & No Error!
If you try to make a change using a CSV Upload and nothing happens to the employee record(s), the first thing to check is the format.
A CSV file must be formatted exactly as it was downloaded to be accepted, so it's best to check your file to make sure it wasn't saved in a format other than CSV and no changes were made to the first line (headers) of the CSV file.
Another thing to check for is a conflicting Effective Date - two Cost Rate changes can't be made on the same date!
Finally, look for any double-IDs (someone listed more than once) that may be blocking one another. Remember, one upload means one change to the Employee Profile!