Before importing your file, it is best to clean your data and make sure they are accurate and relevant. Clean data will ensure analytics and reports accurately reflect company information. Dirty data ruins the efficiency of sorting and filtering.

Duplicates, for instance, make it difficult to enter new contacts or opportunities and even keep track of revenue. Dirty data makes your data unreliable and untrustworthy.

Best cleanup practices include deleting duplicate records, correcting spelling and punctuation errors, enforcing naming conventions and filling in incomplete records.

Once data is clean, let’s see the best way to prepare a file.

You’ll need to match field names. This is achieved with the field mapping option within Data Loader. For more complex data, like opportunities, a useful shortcut is to do an export using Data Loader and selecting all the necessary fields to match what’s in your import file. Once that’s done, you can replace exported data (but keeping the columns headers, with the new data to be imported.

Important to remember is that you need a Record Owner ID in order to assign records appropriately. Otherwise, all records will be assigned by default to the person loading the data. Owner ID is the user’s Salesforce ID. But if you’re importing opportunities, or using Data Loader, this must be the Salesforce Record ID.

Next, let’s prepare Salesforce.

If you’re capturing data that is not included in Salesforce standard fields, you need to create Custom Fields beforehand. New picklist values will be added, but they will not be available for future records until you manually add them as available values for the field. Create External ID, if necessary, in order to store other systems identifiers you may be using.

Once your data is cleaned, keep it clean. Use automation whenever possible. Use validation rules in order to keep data consistent across records. Use picklists to eliminate the possibility of misspelling on common items (like state/nation names). Lookup fields can be used to avoid the creation of duplicate records. Workflow field updates and custom formula may also be employed to automatically populate fields, removing the potential for human error.