What is in the file
One sheet called Tracker, fifteen columns, five rows of invented students so you can see the shape before you delete them. A second sheet called Read me spells out what every column does on import. The CSV is the same five rows with the header spellings a CRM import folds, in case you want to skip the workbook.
The columns are the ones an admissions desk keeps reaching for:
| Column | Why it earns its place |
|---|---|
| Name, Phone Number, Email | The person. Phone is the one that has to be right. |
| Source | Where the enquiry came from. This is the column that answers which spend is working. |
| Stage | Where the enquiry has reached. |
| Owner | The counsellor answering. Blank means nobody, and blank is where enquiries die. |
| Created Date | When the enquiry actually arrived, not when you typed it in. |
| Course, Intake | What they asked about, and for which year. |
| Demo On, Demo Attended | Booked, and then kept or not. Two separate questions. |
| Fee Quoted, Fee Paid | Quoted is a conversation. Paid is an admission. Never one column. |
| Next Follow Up | The only date that decides what your morning looks like. |
| Notes | The one sentence the next person needs. |
Two things to set up in the sheet, once
Neither can be baked into the file, so they take a minute each.
Overdue follow-ups in red. Select the Next Follow Up column, then Conditional
formatting, New rule, Format only cells that contain, Cell value, less than, and type
=TODAY(). Pick a red fill. Anything overdue now shows itself without you sorting.
Stage as a dropdown. Select the Stage column, then Data, Data validation, List, and type your own stage names separated by commas. This is worth doing even if you never touch a CRM, because it stops the same stage existing as three spellings.
Define your stages in words and keep the list short. A workable default for admissions: New, Contacted, Demo Booked, Demo Done, Fee Discussed, Enrolled, Lost. If a stage cannot be explained in one sentence, it is not a stage.
When a sheet is enough, and when it stops being enough
A sheet is genuinely fine when one person is answering everything, the volume is low enough to read top to bottom every morning, and nobody else needs to see it while you have it open.
It stops being enough at recognisable moments. Two people editing the same file and overwriting each other. Nobody being able to say who spoke to a parent last, or when. Follow-ups that only happen when somebody remembers to look. Enquiries arriving on WhatsApp and on a form and on a phone call, and only some of them reaching the sheet. A counsellor leaving and taking the context with them.
None of that is solved by a better spreadsheet. It is solved by shared history, assignment, and a reminder that fires whether or not anyone opened the file.
What each column does if you import it
This section is the part most template pages skip. The behaviour below is read off the importer, not guessed, and the traps are real.
The header spellings matter, but not much. The importer lowercases your header and
strips spaces, underscores and hyphens before matching, so Phone Number, phone_number
and phonenumber are the same thing. Email folds from Email, Email ID, Mail ID and
Email Address. Owner folds from Owner, Owners, Assigned To, Assign To, Lead Owner.
Created Date folds from Created Date, Creation Date, Lead Date and Date.
Your admissions columns are not lost. Course, Intake, Demo On, Demo Attended, Fee Quoted, Fee Paid, Next Follow Up and Notes are not columns a CRM knows. Each one survives as a custom field keyed by your header text, so nothing is thrown away.
Stage is stored exactly as you typed it, and nobody checks it. This is the trap. A value that does not match one of your configured stages is still written, and the lead then sits on a stage no filter in the product can find. There is validation on other paths, but not on the import. Type your exact stage names, which is the real reason the dropdown above is worth setting up.
Owner is matched, or silently dropped. An email is matched to exactly one live user. If there is no email, an exact name match is tried. Anything else, including two users with the same name, imports the lead unassigned and nothing warns you. Put emails in that column.
Dates are read day first. 03/09/2026 is 3 September, not 9 March. An unambiguous
25/12/2026 can only be day first anyway, and a US-style 12/25/2026 falls through to
month first. Excel’s own date serials are understood.
Two phone numbers in one cell are handled. The first becomes the number, the rest land in Other Numbers rather than being discarded.
Leave Status out. It is a fixed internal list, not your stage names, and it defaults sensibly on its own. Stage is the column you care about.
Three more facts worth knowing before you click import:
- An import does not run your automations and does not run your distribution rules. Nobody is notified and nothing is auto-assigned. That is usually what you want for a back-file, and it is a surprise if you expected a welcome message.
- Duplicates are checked inside the file you upload, never against the leads already in the CRM.
- Only the first sheet is read, which is why the Read me sheet is second. CSV, XLS and XLSX all work, up to 50 MB.
We have not run your specific sheet through an import, so treat this as what the importer does, not as a promise about your file. If you want it checked, send it over and we will run it with you.
Where to go next
If you want the messages to go with the follow-ups this sheet tracks, the admission follow-up message pack has eight of them, with the trigger and stop rule for each. If you are closer to moving off the sheet entirely, onboarding covers what an assisted migration actually includes, and the guide on importing leads from CSV or Excel is the step by step version of the section above.