# People and imports

Load people into your organisation from an electoral roll or any CSV, keep them current, and decide which workspaces can see them.

The organisation holds every person once. Workspaces don't own people; they are
given access to them. That is what lets a national organisation load one roll
and have each electorate see only its own electors.

Open the organisation view and choose **People** to see everyone you hold.

## Importing a file

Choose **Import people**.

### Upload

Pick the file, the country, and the format. The country defaults to your
organisation's and decides which address data people are matched against. The
format is that country's roll — **NZ electoral roll** or **AEC roll (ERA)** — or
**Any CSV**; choosing a roll fills in the column mapping for you.

The file goes straight to private storage. It can be up to 5 GB.

### Review

Prenso shows the columns with a sample of their values. For each, choose where
it goes — a name, a contact detail, an opt-out, part of an address, coordinates,
a birth date or age band, an area such as an electorate, a tag, or a custom
field — or leave it out. Only organisation-wide tags, and organisation-wide
fields with one shared answer, can take a column.

Phone numbers go to **Mobile** or **Landline**. Columns headed Mobile, Cell,
Landline, or Home phone map themselves. One headed just Phone is left for you to
send to the right place, because Prenso doesn't guess from the number.

Under **Recognise people by**, choose the column, or columns, that identify each
person in this source. That key is how a later file updates the same people
rather than adding them again.

Then continue to the settings and decide:

- **Which source this is.** Reuse a source when the file is a newer extract of
  the same thing; that is what makes it an update. Set **Extract taken on** as
  well: a source refuses a file older than the newest one it has finished
  importing.
- **What happens to people the source already holds** — update them from this
  file, or leave them as they are.
- **Whether the file is the whole source.** If it is, anyone it no longer lists
  is marked inactive. Prenso refuses to do this when the file holds fewer than
  half the people the source did, since that is more often a bad download than
  a real change.
- **Which workspaces see these people** — see below.

### Start

Choose **Start import**. It runs in the background and you can leave the page.
**Imports**, at the top of People, shows each file's progress, what it added, updated, and left unchanged, and any rows
it could not read, with the reason.

> **Good to know**
>
> A blank cell never clears what you already hold, and an import only ever sets
> an opt-out — it never removes one. Rows that fail are skipped and reported;
> the rest of the file still imports.

You can cancel an import that is running, and retry one that failed; it picks
up where it stopped. The uploaded file is deleted a day after the import
finishes, and after that it can't be retried.

## Deciding which workspaces see whom

Access is explicit. A workspace sees a person only if it has been given them,
and never merely because their address falls inside its area — so a wrongly
matched address can't put someone in front of the wrong team.

There are three ways to give access:

- **From the file.** During review, give everyone in the file to one workspace,
  allocate by a column, or both: choose the electorate column, say, and map each
  of its values to a workspace.
- **In bulk, by filter.** In People, build a filter and choose **Workspace
  access** to add everyone it matches to a workspace, or remove them. It follows
  the filter rather than the search box, so clear any search first.
- **One at a time,** from a person's page.

Access that came from a file follows that source: when a later file moves
someone to a different electorate, their workspace changes with it. Access you
gave by hand is never touched by an import.

## Limits

Active people count against your plan's limit across the organisation: 1,000 on
Starter, 15,000 on Pro, 250,000 on Business, unlimited on Enterprise. Retired
people don't count, and updating someone you already hold doesn't use any of it.

An import that reaches the limit stops with a message, and the people already
added stay. Upgrade and retry within a day, or upload the file again.

## Tags and custom fields

Create these in the organisation view to share one vocabulary across every
workspace, and mark any of them read-only if workspaces should see but not
change them. Workspaces can add their own alongside. See
[People](/docs/workspaces/people#tags-and-custom-fields).

> **Electoral rolls**
>
> Roll data comes with legal limits on who may hold it and what it may be used
> for. Prenso stores what you upload; making sure you are entitled to it, and
> use it only for permitted purposes, is your responsibility.