Sync your people with a CSV

Add, update, and deactivate your people in one step with a CSV upload, with a full preview before anything changes.

Sync your people with a CSV

Keep your people up to date in one step. A sync lets you add new people, update existing ones, and deactivate leavers, all from a single CSV upload and with a full preview before anything changes.

🎬 Watch this as a short narrated video

Steps shown in this video

Open People & Teams → People in the admin area
Choose Bulk invite / Update people by CSV
Download the template so your columns match what the sync expects
Export your current people as a backup before making changes
Upload your CSV — every row is validated, you preview all changes, then click Process users to apply

What a sync can do

Each row in your CSV maps to one person. In a single sync you can:

Add new people to your organisation.
Update details on existing people, such as their team, region, manager, start date, role, and custom fields.
Deactivate people who have left. They lose access, but their learning history is kept.
Reactivate someone who was previously deactivated.

You can include up to 5,000 rows in one sync.

Before you start

Go to People and select Bulk invite / Update people by CSV. You'll see a short warning first, because a sync can overwrite existing details. From here you can:

Download the template so your columns match what the sync expects.
Export your current people as a backup before you make changes.

Preparing your CSV

The template includes these columns:

Column	Required	Notes
first_name	Yes
last_name	Yes
work_email	Yes	Used to match each person. Must be unique.
team_name	No	If the team doesn't exist yet, it's created for you.
reports_to	No	The manager's work email. They must already be in 5Mins or elsewhere in the same file.
region	No
start_date	No	Use the format DD-MM-YYYY. A future date schedules the invite for that day.
status	No	ACTIVE or INACTIVE.
role	No	Maps the person to a role.
employee_number	No	An external identifier for the person, such as their HR-system employee number.
custom fields	No	One column per custom field you've set up.

A few rules to know

Blank means unchanged. If you leave a cell empty for someone who already exists, their current value stays as it is.
You can't add a new person as INACTIVE. New people must be active. To deactivate someone, set their status to INACTIVE on a row that matches an existing person.
Managers must exist. The email in reports_to has to belong to someone already in 5Mins or in the same file. Circular reporting lines, where two people are set as each other's manager, are rejected.

Previewing and confirming

5Mins checks your file before anything changes, then shows you exactly what will happen:

Validation. If any row has a problem, those rows are grouped under an Errors tab that tells you which row to fix and why. You can filter the list by error type, and use Download Error File to export every issue (with the fix for each) so you can correct your CSV and re-upload. Nothing is applied until every row is valid.
Preview. You'll see a summary of the changes, including how many people will be added, updated, deactivated, reactivated, or left unchanged, along with the field-level changes for each person.
Confirm. Click Process users to apply the sync.

Once it runs, you'll get a summary of what changed.

Good to know

Validation is all-or-nothing. If one row fails, no changes are made, so you can fix the file and try again without leaving things half-done.
Set up custom fields and roles first. Create any custom fields and roles before you reference them in the file.
Syncs are manual. Run a sync whenever you need to. If your people come from an HR system, those updates flow in automatically through your HRIS integration instead.