Articles on: Sematime Messaging

How to add parent contacts from an Excel file

Sematime organizes parent contacts using 'groups'. This way you can have different groups for each of the classes in your school or even create own custom groups such as latecomers, Football team, Drama club etc where group members are students from different classes.

Phone numbers have been masked for privacy protection

The first step of adding contacts from an Excel file is ensuring that you are using the correct format. Our system expects the following columns in their respective order.

Student ID - this is the unique identifier your school has assigned to each student. It can be numeric(all digits) or alphanumeric(mixed digits and letters). Most schools refer to it as the 'admission number'.
Student name - the name of the student.
Primary phone number - the main phone number of the parent.
Secondary phone number(optional) - for parents who have more than one phone number .

Sematime does not need you to prefix phone numbers using the country code unless you are saving a non-Kenyan phone number such as +255706129100.

Once your Excel file is ready, login to your Sematime Messaging account, go to 'Contacts' on your menu and click the blue 'Add Contacts' button. The dialog window below will appear on your screen prompting you to choose the Excel file whose contacts you want to add. Click the 'Select File' or drag-and-drop the file from your computer into the dotted area.



The system will process your file and then show a preview of the data contained. If there is any data that you do not wish to add select the respective row and click on the 'Delete Contact' button as highlighted in the image below.



Finally, click the blue 'Add Contacts' button to choose the group you want to add the contacts to. You can also create a new group.



That's it. Your contacts have been added successfully. You may proceed to add contacts for other classes or close the 'Add Contacts' dialog window. Here is how you account will look like.



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Updated on: 04/04/2024

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