How to Import Data into Related (Parent–Child) Tables

Most real applications aren't a single table — they're related tables, like Companies and their Contacts, or Locations and their Regions. This article walks through importing data into a parent–child structure so that every child record ends up linked to the right parent.

Prerequisite: You must be an administrator to import. It also helps to understand Record IDs and table relationships before you begin.

The one rule that makes relationship imports work

TrackVia links a child record to its parent by matching values in your import file against the parent table's Record ID. That means your child-table spreadsheet must contain one column for every component of the parent's Record ID, and the values must match existing parent records exactly — same spelling, same capitalization, no leading or trailing spaces, no double spaces between words.

If the parent's Record ID is a single field (say, Company Name), your child file needs one extra column. If the Record ID is composed of multiple fields (say, City + State), your child file needs one column for each.

Step 1: Import the parent table first

Order matters. Parents must exist before children can link to them. Import your parent records first, following How to Import to an Existing Table or How to Import a Spreadsheet to Create a New Table.

Before moving on, check the parent table for duplicates on the Record ID. If two parent records share the same Record ID value, TrackVia can't determine which one a child should link to, and every affected child row will fail with: "The record ID 'XYZ' does not uniquely match a value in the parent table." Dedupe the parent table, or change the parent's Record ID to something guaranteed unique, such as an auto counter.

Step 2: Prepare the child spreadsheet

Worked example. Suppose Locations is the parent table and Company Region is the child. The Locations Record ID is composed of two fields: City and State. Your Company Region import file therefore needs its own data columns plus a City column and a State column:

Region Name	Sales Rep	City	State
Metro North	J. Rivera	Denver	CO
Metro South	A. Chen	Denver	CO
Front Range	J. Rivera	Boulder	CO

Each City + State pair must exactly match one existing Location record. Follow the general rules in How to Prepare a Spreadsheet for Importing for everything else (single flat table, one header row, .xlsx or .csv, and so on).

Tip: A fast way to guarantee exact matches is to export the parent table's Record ID values from TrackVia and use them (via VLOOKUP/XLOOKUP in Excel) to populate the parent columns in your child file, rather than typing them by hand.

Step 3: Import the child file and map the relationship

Run the import on the child table. On the Map step of the wizard, you'll see the related parent table represented with brackets around its Record ID components. Map your City column to the bracketed City component and your State column to the bracketed State component. Map the rest of your columns to the child table's own fields as usual.

If you're importing to create the child table rather than importing into an existing one, use the "link imported data to an existing table" option on the Map step and map the parent Record ID components the same way.

Step 4: Check the results and fix link failures

When the import completes, review the Results tab and the emailed error report. The two errors specific to relationship imports are:

"The record ID 'XYZ' does not uniquely match a value in the parent table 'ABC'" — either no parent matched (check spelling, spacing, and that the parent actually exists) or more than one parent matched (dedupe the parent table or make its Record ID more unique).

"The field 'ABC' is empty and is part of the Record ID" — one of your parent-component columns has a blank cell in that row. Fill in the value and re-import the failed rows.

For the full list of import errors and fixes, see Troubleshooting Imports.

Multi-level structures

For a three-level structure (grandparent → parent → child), apply the same process top-down: import grandparents, then parents (whose file contains the grandparent's Record ID components), then children (whose file contains the parent's Record ID components).