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Summary
Populating your organization in Blissbook allows you to easily share your handbook(s) with everyone at your company and makes it easy to see who has and who hasn't signed their acknowledgement.
Uploading an employee list .csv file synchronizes your organization in Blissbook with that file. It is a full file sync. People on the list who aren't in Blissbook will be added to your organization, and those not on the list who are currently in Blissbook will be archived. Groups receive the same treatment. This means you should always sync a full file that includes all of those who should have an active Blissbook account.
Upload
To upload your employee list file, go to your Organization page: click EMPLOYEES in the side nav, then on the Employee List tab click the "Add or Import" button, then choose Import Members via CSV.
If you do not see this button, someone may have already installed an automated sync. Click the EMPLOYEE LIST SYNC tab in Settings to check that. You can find your credentials or uninstall the automated sync by clicking the Update button.
Note: If you are setting up an automated sync, you can verify that it worked by going to your Employees page. If your SFTP sync was successful, you'll see a timestamp of the upload in the top right corner and you will see your full list of employees.
General Notes
Before we link to the templates that you should base your .csv upload file on, here are some general notes:
Make sure your column headers match what's in the template file exactly.
The only required columns are Email Address and Name - every row (person) must have these.
You can only send us a single email address per user as it is used as a unique identifier.
The Name column should be someone's full name, as in "First Last". You can send "Last, First" and we will convert it to "First Last", but everyone on the file must use that format for the conversion to work. You cannot send separate columns for first names and last names.
Employee ID is highly recommended. It prevents an employee from being archived and then created as a new person if their name or email address changes. Duplicate IDs are not allowed. Note: this field is a string, not a number, which means "000512" is not interchangeable with "512". Pick one format and stick with it.
If you want Blissbook to handle rehires, then you must include a Latest Hire Date column. Rehires get asked to sign your handbook again even if they've already signed it.
Employee data in Blissbook is encoded as UTF-8, so special characters with åčçęñtś and what not should appear as expected as long as your file is encoded as UTF-8.
Download a template file that includes Groups (see Groups section below)
Rehires
If your company is larger and/or rehires employees often, you will want to include the optional "Latest Hire Date" column on your file. Blissbook uses this field to determine if a new employee is a rehire. Rehires are prompted (and emailed if you have auto emails turned on) to sign and/or view a handbook again even if they've already signed and/or viewed that handbook.
This date should be whatever the latest hired date is for an employee. If they've never been rehired, it would be their original hire date. If this field is left blank for an employee, their hire date will be the day they were originally added to Blissbook.
You have 3 options for the format of Latest Hire Date: YYYY-MM-DD, M/D/YYYY, or MM/DD/YYYY.
If you have any questions about how this field works, please contact us.
Managers
Sometimes managers need to be involved in the employee handbook process. With Blissbook's automated manager escalation functionality, you can CC managers on automated reminders, view documentation for a specific manager's staff, and even allow managers to access & print documentation for their staff.
To enable automated manager escalation you must tell Blissbook who each employee's manager is. Do this via file sync by adding a column with a header that starts with the text "Manager", and in that column provide the employee ID for each employee's manager. If your organization has any co-manager situations, you can have multiple columns (e.g. "Manager 1", "Manager 2", etc.).
Download a template file that includes the Manager
Custom Fields and Groups
You can sync custom fields with a unique header row value (row 1), with it's values in the same column on each person's row. You can also send generic Groups (they work like tags or labels) by including data under a header that is "Group" or "Groups" or empty.
Sending this data makes it easy to personalize content for users - for example if you have a California addendum or other policies that only apply to specific populations of people. You can also use these fields/groups to filter employees in your reporting center, to set the audience of a document, to create and use saved segments, or to customize who is in a signature round.
Custom fields and groups are optional. If you use them, you may list as many for an employee as you'd like. For Groups, simply add them in a new column on each person's row. You do not need a duplicate or separate Group/Group2/etc. header for those additional group columns (but you can if you want, as long as the text starts with "group" or "groups").
Groups
Groups work like tags or labels. They're a list of individual values for each user record. Unlike custom fields, they are not a key:value pair. This is why the values all get listed under a "Group" or "Groups" column header in your file, and is why your file should not have a unique column header for each group (e.g. Work State, Department, Employment Status, etc.). They will show up in Blissbook all together in a "Groups" section.
If you're using an automation system (e.g. Microsoft Power Automate) to generate your data, you may be required to have a header for each column. In that case, use "Group 1", "Group 2", etc.
Custom Fields
Certain headers are detected and reserved for default Blissbook columns, so there are some restrictions on the headers you are allowed to use.
You cannot use any custom field headers that contain the following text:
"name"
"email"
"employee id" or "employee number"
"external id" or "external number"
"hire date" or "hired date"
You cannot use any custom field headers that start with the following text:
"manager" or "managers"
Note: An "IsManager: TRUE/FALSE" column is acceptable because it does not start with "manager".
"group" or "groups"
Note: "Group Code" won't come in as a custom field, but "Location Group Code" will.
These restrictions are case-insensitive. For example, you cannot work around them by sending us "MaNAgEr StaTUs".
Note: If you are currently sending us data as Groups, and you want to use Custom Fields, do not switch all Groups to Custom Fields on your first file sync. You want to start by syncing both so we can migrate your audience and/or personalized content settings over to use those Fields, then you can drop Groups off your file. See our migration advice in our Custom Fields article.
Automation
Hey, want to automate your file sync? We've got you covered!