Frequently Asked Questions

What filetypes does SmartUpload support?

You can upload XSLX files. The upload of plain text (CSV) files is not supported, because these files are notoriously bad for importing data, because they are unformatted and prone to interpretation errors.

Who can use SmartUpload?

SmartUpload has been designed to be easy to use for two types of users:

Regular users: for whom uploading Excel files into Salesforce should be straightforward, without needing technical knowledge.
Administrators: who can manage mapping templates for users, which does require technical knowledge.

Why can't I add a new mapping?

This is only allowed for users with the 'Salesforce Adminstrator' profile, or those users who have been made Administrator within SmartUpload by a Salesforce Administrator.

How does SmartUpload compare to Dataloader.io?

For many Salesforce Admins looking for a web-based solution, Dataloader.io is the first tool they use when importing data into Salesforce. It has many similarities to SmartUpload, however there are some important differences:

SmartUpload ...

... supports upserts on other fields than ExternId
... supports updates on other fields than Id or Externid
....supports XLS(X) files natively, up to 1 million rows
... can perform data validation before processing an upload
... can perform lookups dynamically, to aggregate data before processing an upload
... has a clear separation of responsibilities between Admins and Users.

However, SmartUpload does not yet support the following:

Automatically Recurring jobs
Integrations with Dropbox, Onedrive, Box, SFTP

Summarizing, SmartUpload has many advantages, for a fraction of the price.

How does SmartUpload compare to Dataloader?

When using the Dataloader command-line utility, there are quite some hurdles to cross especially for business users.

While for Salesforce Admins the dataloader is a very powerful tool (allowing you to do massive uploads of CSV files), it has several disadvantages when you want to allow business users to upload data. Many of these are the same as the comparison with Dataloader.IO, but additionally:

... it requires you to install Java and the Dataloader utility on your local computer: it is not web-based but a native application.
... it does require a bit of technical knowhow, and while re-using templates is possible, the steps required to take as an end-user can be quite daunting.

All these disadvantages disappear when using SmartUpload.