Importing existing cases
Bring live work into Hendl without stopping the work.
On this page
Most teams arrive with cases already in flight. You do not have to wait for them to close.
Decide what comes over
Three options, and the middle one is right more often than people expect.
Everything. Full history for every case, open and closed. Worth it if you are being inspected on historical cases, or if the old system is being switched off.
Open cases only. Live work moves; closed cases stay readable in the old system. Fastest to a working state, and the option most teams should take.
Open cases, summarised. Each open case arrives with its key fields and a single summary document rather than a full document history. Right when the old system's history is not trustworthy enough to carry forward.
Prepare the export
Ask for a CSV with one row per case and a separate folder of documents named by case reference. Include the current stage and the date the case entered it — without that second field every imported case looks like it started the day you imported it, and every deadline is wrong.
Run the import
- Settings → Import → New import.
- Upload the CSV and map the columns to case-type fields. The mapping is saved, so a second batch does not repeat this.
- Choose whether to run workflows on imported cases. Normally no — you do not want three hundred acknowledgement emails going out to people whose cases opened last month.
- Run against a sample of ten first. Check them by hand.
- Run the rest.
Afterwards
The import log lists every row, whether it succeeded, and why it failed if it did not. Failures are usually a case reference that already exists or a stage name that does not match the case type.