Hello everyone and welcome back to the stratus-io feature highlights. My name is Ashton and today we will be talking about uploading attendance lists into the Cloud-In-Hand Platform database and customizing the data fields so we’re tracking all the data we need in our attendance records.

In this video, we will create custom fields, upload our list, map the new fields, and make edits to our uploaded data. This process works whether you are creating an employee database, student database, or an event database.

We’ll create our custom fields first. On the left-hand side of the screen, click “Employee Page Settings.” Here, we can edit, enable, and disable fields. We’ll edit the fields first.

To do this, we simply click a field we want to rename and change the text. For example, let’s say we need to include an Emergency Contact Name and Number for each individual on our list. We’ll identify the standard fields that we don’t need, we’ll say Department and Title. We can then change these field names to “Emergency Contact Name” and “Emergency Contact Number.”

You can change as many column names as you need, except for our three required fields: Name, Badge ID, and Company. We have to have data in those three fields and we are not able to edit or disable them.

If we want to hide any of the other fields, we can uncheck the box next to that particular field. Disabled fields can still contain data and we can enable them whenever we need to see that data. For example, if we have the “Department” field disabled, but need to pull a report and sort it by department, we can go back into our Employee Page Settings, enable “Department,” and then filter and pull our report. We can disable and enable all of our fields at any time, except for the three required fields.

Now that we’ve created our custom fields, let’s upload our attendance list and map the fields to our data. I’ll be using a list with dummy data for this demonstration, but you can use any Excel, Google Sheet, or comma delimited file with your list.

Click here on the left where it says “Employees” and from here we can choose to add one individual at a time or we can upload a file and add our entire list at once. We’ll be uploading our list, but since our custom fields have the “First Name” and “Last Name” columns separate, we want to make sure that we click the “Merge and Map Data Columns” box before we continue. Once the box is checked, we’ll click “Choose File,” find our list, and then click “Upload.”

Once we have uploaded our list, we’ll see a prompt to merge and map our uploaded data to the appropriate fields. First, we’ll merge our first and last name columns by clicking on the box, typing “Name” and dragging and dropping the “First Name” and “Last Name” fields into the box.

After we proceed, we can then properly map each of our fields from drop down menus next to each column header. Once we’ve mapped our fields, we can go back to the “Roster” page we started from and see everyone from our list has been added to the database.

What if we need to make changes after we’re uploaded our attendance list though?

If we need to edit information for an individual, for example, if we have the field “Department” and someone moved from one department to another, we can scroll all the way to the right of our roster list and click the “Edit” button for that record and make the change.

If we need to make changes to fields for everyone on our list, we first download our current list from the database. We can then make then changes to the file we just downloaded.

To update our database with the changes, we repeat the steps above to upload our edited list. When we go back to the “Employees” page again to view our list, we can see our edits have been made without changing any of the other data. As long as the Badge ID remains the same, you can make bulk changes to your database without losing your attendance records.

So now we know how to edit field names, upload lists, enable and disable fields, and make changes to our roster once it’s been uploaded. Except for the three required fields, Name, Badge ID, and Company, the database can be completely customized so you don’t have to make major changes to your list’s data fields before you upload, as well as to make sure all of the information you need is included.

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