Importing leave

This page is for org admins. If you’ve been tracking leave somewhere else, bring it across under Organisation Settings > Import Leave. It’s three steps, and nothing is saved until the last one. The import itself sends no emails: nobody is told about the leave it adds.

1. Upload

Choose Where is your leave now? For BambooHR, Breathe, BrightHR, CharlieHR, Leave Dates, Personio or Timetastic you’ll see numbered steps for exporting it. For a spreadsheet, you can Download a template.

Then choose Your File: a .csv, .tsv or .txt file, an Excel .xlsx file or an OpenDocument .ods file, up to 5MB and 5,000 rows. Upload it as it is, with no need to tidy it first. Older Excel .xls files aren’t accepted, so save it as .xlsx from Excel. If a file has more than 5,000 rows, Match Columns says so and only the first 5,000 are imported: split it and import the rest separately. Bookings already in Folke are skipped, so that’s safe.

Column guide explains what goes in each column.

2. Match columns

Folke makes a first guess, and each column shows its first value so you can tell which is which.

• Team member: their email address, or their name as it is on your team. “Surname, First” works too.
• Start Date, and End Date, which can be blank for a single day.
• Date Format: choose the one your file uses.
• Leave Type.
• More columns: First Name, Last Name, Notes, Admin Notes, Status, Start Half Day, End Half Day and Days.

Then select Check import.

3. Check and import

Every row is checked before anything is saved. Rows that will be skipped come first, each with the reason. Then select Import, which says how many bookings are ready, like Import 42 bookings.

A leave type nothing matches is never guessed. Exact names match first, then meanings, so “Holiday” becomes Annual Leave and “Sickness” becomes Sick Leave. If nothing matches a type, choose one for it, or leave it out. That way training or unpaid days don’t quietly eat into someone’s holiday. Rows with no type at all import as Annual Leave unless you choose otherwise.

Status: a blank status, or one Folke doesn’t recognise, imports as approved. Pending rows land in Requests for someone to decide.

Booking rules don’t apply. Imported leave is a record of what happened, so notice, allowance, no-leave dates and the rule against past dates are all skipped. Its days are still counted with your organisation’s rules and each team member’s working days.

Duplicates are skipped: the same team member with the same dates, already in Folke or further up the file. Importing the same file twice adds nothing the second time.

Rows without notes are noted as “Imported”.

Team members who aren’t in Folke yet

A row for someone new adds them to your team, as long as it has a real email address and a First Name. They:

• join as a Staff Member, with no team role, country or start date
• count as a seat straight away, on your bill too, and appear on the calendar
• are booked into upcoming closures that come off allowance
• aren’t sent an invite. Invite them when you’re ready, with Resend invite on the team list.
• get no emails from Folke at all until they’ve accepted an invite and signed in: no reminders, announcements or heads-ups

An address that already has a Folke account can’t be added from an import. Ask them to join with your organisation code, then import their leave.

If your file includes anyone who has left, remove them once their history is in, to free their seats and stop those emails reaching them.