Moving from a spreadsheet to online bookings

If your bookings live in a spreadsheet, the hard part of moving online is rarely the idea. It is the setup. You already have columns for the customer, the dates, the room or item, and the odd extra like attendee numbers. Typing all of that into a new system again is what keeps people putting it off.

Alion Booking has a way to reuse that work. You upload a CSV, and it proposes a booking form based on your columns. This article walks through it, and is plain about what it does not do.

What the import does, and what it does not

Start with the limit, because it catches people out.

Create from import builds a new booking form from the structure of your file. That means the form itself, its inventory items, and the custom fields behind your columns. It also adds any pricing it can work out safely.

It does not bulk-load your old bookings. It is not a way to push a year of past rows into an existing form. If you have bookings already on the books for next month, plan to keep a note of them while you set up, and check them against the new form's availability yourself.

Think of it as a fast way to set up the online version of a service you already run, using your spreadsheet as the template.

Get your spreadsheet ready

The best input is booking or export data where each row is one booking or request. Columns that help:

• Customer details: name, email, phone.
• Booking schedule: start and end date and time.
• The item or room booked, and the quantity.
• Anything specific to your service, such as number of attendees, vessel length or add-ons.
• Payment state and booking status.

Some practical points:

• Save the file as a CSV. That is the only supported format for now, and files up to 10MB are accepted.
• Give every column a clear header, and include real data rows. The import has only your headers and sample rows to go on.
• Tidy obvious mess first. A column called "Notes 2" with half-finished entries is hard for anyone to interpret.

Upload and interpret

1. Go to Dashboard › Bookings › Create from import.
2. Click the drop zone, or drag your CSV onto it.
3. Alion detects the file's structure and lists it under Recent import sessions. You can click View on a session at any time to reopen it.
4. Open the session and click Interpret with AI.

Alion looks at your columns and sample rows and proposes how to turn them into a form. You can watch its progress, and it flags any warnings or errors. If it reports that the file can't be interpreted, upload a cleaner CSV with clear headers and real data rows, then run it again.

Review the mapping before anything is built

This is the step where you stay in charge. Nothing is created until you review the proposal and click Create form.

In the Mapping editor, check the form-level settings first:

• Form name: what the new form is called.
• Booking unit: what a booking is made of. Minutes, a day, a night, or one indivisible booking.
• Date picker: how the customer chooses dates. Only pickers that suit your unit are offered.
• Inventory source column: the column that names the item being booked. If every row is the same item, choose Use one default inventory item.
• Default inventory item name: the name used when there is no inventory column.

A small hotel might choose a night unit. A meeting room firm might choose an hourly unit. Pick the one that matches how you charge and how customers think about the booking.

Then go column by column. For each source column you can set:

• Include: tick to bring the column in, untick to leave it out.
• Maps to: Custom field (attribute) for ordinary form questions, or a core target such as start and end date and time, booker name, email or phone.
• Field label: what customers will see. It can be up to 30 characters.
• Field type: text, number, select, multiselect, checkbox, acknowledgement checkbox, textarea, date, time or datetime.
• Required: whether the customer must fill it in.

What to leave out

Your spreadsheet probably has columns that are for you, not for customers. Internal notes, "chased deposit?" ticks and old payment references are examples. Untick Include for those. A public form should ask only what you need to take the booking.

Use Sample rows preview to check each mapping against real values from your file. If you change anything, click Save mapping. The Create form button stays disabled while there are unsaved edits.

Pricing

The panel tells you how many pricing rules, pricing periods and public variants were inferred safely. If none could be, that is fine. The form is still created, and you set up pricing on the Pricing tab afterwards, before taking paid bookings.

Create the form

Click Create form. Alion reads the full file and builds the form, inventory, fields and any safe pricing rules in the background. With a large file you can leave the page and come back. The session reconnects to the job when you reopen it.

When it finishes, you get a summary of what was built, and the new form appears in Booking Forms.

Fine-tune before you go live

Click Open form editor. The import gives you a starting point, not a finished form. The help suggests reviewing inventory, fields, pricing and payment before going live. Here is what to look at, tab by tab.

Basic Info

Check the Booking unit and Date picker again. Then look at the Bookings start at / Bookings end at settings. A booking always runs from one time to another, even when the customer is not asked for a time. Setting your hours here means a booking runs, say, from 2pm in to 10am out, rather than whatever time the customer happened to open the form. Where the customer does choose a time, their answer stands.

Inventory

Confirm the items match what you actually rent or run. Check Units, which is how many concurrent bookings each item allows. Use one item with several units for an interchangeable pool, such as six identical courts. Use separate one-unit items when you track them by name, such as Court A and Court B.

Steps and fields

Drag fields between steps to shape the flow. Email is always required, because it is used for confirmations and invoices, and it cannot be removed. Beyond that, only mark a field required if the booking genuinely cannot go ahead without it. Every extra required field is a place a customer might give up.

Pricing

If no active pricing rule matches, Alion does not invent a price, and the total stays at zero. So make sure at least one rule sets a base price. Use Preview price to check your numbers against a few bookings you know the answer to from your spreadsheet.

Payment

A form can only offer a payment method already set up under Dashboard › Settings › Payment Methods. Decide whether you want Pay now, Pay later or both. With Pay later, the booking is confirmed straight away and you collect payment afterwards.

Test it like a customer

Open the Embed tab for your hosted booking page link. Open it in a private browser window and make one real booking from start to finish. Check that availability is enforced, the price breakdown is right and the confirmation email arrives. Once it behaves, share the link or paste the embed snippet into your website.

Run your spreadsheet alongside the new form for a short while if you have bookings already made. It is a sensible way to catch gaps without risking a double booking.

More on this: https://alion.com.au/help/managing-bookings/import-bookings