Importing and Adding Members

Category: Organiser Features

Overview

Most clubs already have a member list somewhere — a spreadsheet, a register exported from another system, or a form-by-form paper trail. Horsify gives you two ways to get those people onto your roster without sending an invitation email and waiting for each person to accept:

Add a member — create one member at a time, capturing their membership details, contact and profile information, and your club's custom fields on a single form.
Import members — upload a spreadsheet (.xlsx or .csv), check how the columns map, review the rows, and bring everyone in at once.

Both are available from the Member Management page (/organiser/members) using the Add Member and Import buttons at the top-right, next to Invite Member.

The key difference from Invite Member is that these two flows create the person as a login-less member — a complete member record (with profile data and club fields) that exists immediately, whether or not that person ever signs in to Horsify. If they later create a Horsify account with the same email address, Horsify links the two automatically (see Login-less members and auto-linking below).

This guide covers "club membership fields" throughout. Club fields are your organisation's own custom member-profile fields (for example Horse Registration No., Committee Role, Working-with-Children Check). Both the Add form and the import wizard can capture them, and the import can create brand-new club fields straight from your spreadsheet columns.

Who Uses This

Organisation admins — add or import members, map spreadsheet columns, and define club fields.

Riders and members do not use these screens; they are organiser-only tools.

Prerequisites

You must be logged in as an admin of the organisation.
Your organisation must have an active Basic subscription ($10/year) — the Member Management page is blocked without it.
Member Management must be enabled in your Organisation Settings.

The Add Member and Import buttons only appear once an organisation is selected on the Member Management page.

Which Method Should I Use?

Method	Best for	Sends an email?	Creates a login?
Invite Member	Bringing in someone who has (or will create) their own Horsify account	Yes — a secure 7-day link (unless they already have an account)	Yes, on acceptance
Add Member	Recording a single member from your own records	No	No — login-less until they sign up
Import	Loading an existing member register in bulk	No	No — login-less until they sign up

You can mix all three freely. Adding or importing a member never blocks them from creating their own account later — the records link up automatically.

Adding a Single Member

On the Member Management page, click Add Member.
Fill in the form (First name and Surname are required — everything else is optional):

Member details

Field	Notes
First name (required)
Surname (required)
Email	Used later to auto-link the person if they create a Horsify account.
Membership number	Leave blank to auto-generate (when your organisation has auto-generated membership numbers turned on). Otherwise enter your own.
Membership type	Choose from your organisation's active membership fee types. The price is shown beside each type.
Status	Active, Pending, Expired, or Cancelled. Defaults to Active.
Date joined	The membership start date.
Membership expiry	When the membership lapses.
Club administrator	Tick to give this member admin access to the organisation.

Contact & profile

These fields are stored on the member's rider profile — the same information Horsify pre-fills on event entry forms, and the fields shown as "Synced from this member's Horsify profile" on the club-fields panel.

Date of birth
Phone
Street address (line 1 and line 2)
Suburb / town, State, Postcode
Emergency contact name and phone
Medical information
Property Identification Code (PIC)

Club fields

If your organisation has defined any custom club fields, they appear here so you can record them at the same time. (Fields that auto-populate from the rider profile are shown elsewhere as read-only and are not repeated here — see About club fields.)

Click Add member. The member is created immediately and you are returned to the member list, where they appear right away.

Importing Members from a Spreadsheet

Click Import on the Member Management page to open the four-step wizard: Upload → Map columns → Review → Done.

Step 1 — Upload

Choose a .xlsx or .csv file, up to 10 MB.

Horsify reads the file tolerantly, so you rarely need to tidy it up first:

Every worksheet in the workbook is read. If there is more than one, you can pick which sheet to import in the next step.
The header row is detected automatically, so title/banner rows above your column headings are skipped.
Blank rows and obvious junk rows are dropped.

Step 2 — Map columns

Horsify guesses what each spreadsheet column is by looking at its heading, and shows you a table with the spreadsheet column, a few sample values, and what it will import as. Adjust any that are wrong.

Each column can map to one of:

Don't import — ignore this column.
A member field — a built-in Horsify field. Available options include: First name, Surname, Full name, Email, Membership number, Membership type, Role, Date joined, Date resigned, Membership expiry, Payment confirmed, Notes, Date of birth, Phone, Address line 1, Address line 2, Suburb / city, State, Postcode, Emergency contact name, Emergency contact phone, Medical info, and PIC (property code).
An existing club field — one of your organisation's custom member fields.
➕ New club field — create a brand-new club field named after the column heading (see below).

If your file has more than one worksheet, a Sheet selector appears at the top of this step. Switching sheets re-detects the mapping for that sheet.

A note under the table tells you how many new club fields will be created when you continue.

Step 3 — Review

Horsify shows a summary of what it found, colour-coded:

Badge	Meaning
New	No existing member matched — a new member will be created.
Update	Matched an existing member — their record will be updated.
Duplicate	Looks like a duplicate of another row within the same file.
Error	Can't be imported (for example, the row has no name).

Each row lists its number, name, membership number, type and status, plus an Action you can override:

Create — add as a new member.
Update — update the matched existing member.
Skip — don't import this row.

Rows with something worth checking are highlighted with a warning — for example a membership type that didn't match one of your fee types, or a suspected duplicate.

Step 4 — Done

After you import, Horsify shows how many members were Created, Updated and Skipped, and how many new club fields were created. If any individual rows failed, they are listed so you can fix them and re-import just those.

How matching works

A row is matched to an existing member by membership number first; if there is no number match, by name (ignoring case and extra spaces). A match becomes an Update; otherwise the row is New.
Rows that repeat another row in the same file are flagged Duplicate so you don't create the same person twice.
A row with no name at all is flagged Error and cannot be imported.
The membership type in your file is matched to your organisation's active membership fees — an exact match first, then a close match. If nothing matches, the original text is kept in the member's Notes rather than being thrown away, so you can reconcile it later.

What the importer understands

Placeholder values such as blanks, N/A, nil, none, -, TBC, TBA, unknown and ? are treated as empty.
Dates are accepted as real dates, Australian day-first dates (e.g. 3/04/2007 = 3 April), or a bare year (e.g. 2024, read as 1 January 2024).
A "payment confirmed" column counts as Paid when it says yes/paid or contains a date.

About Club (Membership) Fields

Club fields are the custom member-profile fields your organisation defines — anything beyond Horsify's built-in fields that your club wants to record against each member. They appear on the Club fields panel on every member, and both flows on this page can capture them.

Creating new club fields during import

Mapping a spreadsheet column to ➕ New club field tells Horsify to create that field for you when you import. On commit:

The field is added to your organisation's Member Profile template (Horsify creates that template automatically the first time it's needed).
Its type is guessed from the sample values — a column of dates becomes a Date field, a column of yes/no values becomes a Checkbox, and anything else becomes a Text field.

After the import, the new fields are part of your member profile template and can be edited on any member, just like fields you create by hand.

Profile-linked club fields are read-only

Some club fields are configured to auto-populate from the rider's Horsify profile (for example, a "Date of Birth" club field linked to the profile's date of birth). These are read-only mirrors of the member's profile:

They are not shown as editable on the Add form.
The importer skips them — you can't overwrite them from a spreadsheet, because their value always reflects the linked profile.

To change one of these values, edit the underlying profile field (Date of birth, Phone, address, and so on) rather than the club field. See the Contact & profile section for the profile fields Horsify captures.

Login-less Members and Auto-linking

Members you add or import this way have no Horsify login — they are a member record attached to a login-less profile. This is exactly what you want for a historical register: everyone is on your roster immediately, with their profile and club fields intact, and nobody has to do anything.

When that person later creates a Horsify account with the same email address — or when an admin re-saves the member record — Horsify automatically:

Links the member record to the new account, and
Adopts the imported profile into that account, so the date of birth, address and emergency-contact details you imported flow straight into the account they created (rather than leaving them with an empty new profile).

This is the same matching that links riders who sign up independently. See Auto-Link Member to Rider for the full behaviour.

Tip: include an email column in your import (and on the Add form) whenever you have one. It's the key that lets Horsify reunite an imported member with the account they eventually create.

Tips and Good to Know

Nothing is committed until the final step. Uploading and mapping are safe to explore — members are only created or updated when you click Import on the Review step (or Add member on the Add form).
Re-importing is safe. Because existing members are matched and offered as Update, you can re-run an import to refresh data or bring in a corrected file without creating duplicates. Set rows you don't want to touch to Skip.
Membership numbers are auto-generated only when your organisation has that setting on and you leave the number blank; otherwise your own numbers are kept as-is.
Membership fees must be set up first if you want the import to match a "membership type" column to a priced tier — configure them under Organisation Profile → Membership Fees.

Related Features

Member Management — the full member directory: editing, payments, renewals, club credit, and export.
Member Creation (Invite Member) — inviting people who will use their own Horsify account.
Membership Applications — the public self-service application form.
Dependent / Child Membership — junior members under a guardian.
Auto-Link Member to Rider — how imported and added members link to Horsify accounts.
PaperSync — Paper Form OCR Ingestion — bringing members in from scanned or emailed paper forms.

Support

For help importing or adding members, contact support@horsify.com.au or visit the Horsify Help Centre.\n\n---\n\nSource: wiki/features/MEMBER_IMPORT_AND_ADD.md \nLast synced: 2026-07-19 22:05:47 UTC