What Happens When You Import, and Who Gets Notified
Terminology: This universal guide uses neutral descriptions. The product renders its configured property and occupant labels; machine-readable CSV values remain unchanged. Read this before your first...
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Terminology: This universal guide uses neutral descriptions. The product renders its configured property and occupant labels; machine-readable CSV values remain unchanged.
Read this before your first real import. Uploading is quiet: it creates locations and people, and nobody hears anything from URBI until you separately run Bulk Invite. This page covers what the upload itself does; for the notification step see Bulk Invite and Send Reminder.
The short version
Pressing Import does four things, in this order, for every row:
- Creates the location, or finds it if it already exists.
- Sets or upgrades the location's status.
- Creates the person as Pending Invite, with a real sign up link ready but not sent, or links them to the location with a held notice queued if they already have a URBI account.
- Records the outcome for the report that lands in your inbox at the end.
Nothing in these four steps reaches the outside world. Step 3 only prepares what will eventually be sent.
Who becomes Pending Invite, and who gets a held notice
Nobody actually receives anything until Bulk Invite runs. When it does, a Pending Invite person gets a Welcome to URBI email with their personal sign up link (naming every location if they're on more than one), and an already-registered person gets their queued "added to your location" notice, honoring their own notification preferences. See Bulk Invite and Send Reminder for how to press that button.
The sign up link is personal to that person and that location. Once sent, it takes them through identity verification, a look at their location details, and the terms, and ends with a live URBI account.
Running the same file twice does not spam anyone
This is worth knowing, because the fear of a double send is what usually stops people importing.
Uploading the same file twice is always safe, since uploading never sends anything by itself. If an invitation already exists for that email address on that location, URBI keeps the original link and reports the row as a warning instead of creating a second one. Bulk Invite itself is just as safe to press more than once: it only emails a person once per welcome and skips anyone already sent theirs. Re running a corrected file over the top of a partly finished import is therefore safe at every stage: the people already added are left alone and only the new ones are affected.
The one way to deliberately re send a specific person's link before Bulk Invite has run for everyone is Resend Invite on the member, which re delivers the same link rather than issuing a new one, and which stays available even to a staff member whose Add People permission is off.
What changes on the location
| The row's occupant type | The location becomes |
|---|---|
TENANT or PROPERTY_MANAGER |
Rented |
OWNER, RESIDENT or DEPENDENT |
Person |
| Blank, on a location that did not exist before | Vacant |
EMERGENCY_CONTACT |
Unchanged |
On a location that already exists, a rental-classified row always upgrades it to Rented, and a rental-classified row only claims a location that is Vacant or new. An person row can never pull a rented location back to Occupied, so the order of rows in your file does not matter.
Each location also gets its own documents folder
The first time anything is added to a location's Documents tab, whether that is this import or a file someone uploads by hand later, URBI creates and locks that location's own folder automatically. You don't do anything to create it, and a location that never receives a document simply has no folder. It shows as a locked System folder and cannot be renamed, moved, deleted, or shared as a whole.
There is no undo for the locations and people themselves
The importer has no rollback. Once it has run:
- A location created in error is deleted one at a time from the Locations list.
- A person added in error is removed from the location through their member record.
- A sign up link, once it has actually been emailed (by Bulk Invite, Send Reminder, or a manual add elsewhere), cannot be recalled from the recipient's inbox.
Because uploading itself no longer sends anything, correcting a CSV mistake before you press Bulk Invite never involves an email that already went out. This is still the reason the checklist exists: it catches mistakes before Bulk Invite makes them visible to people.
Timing you can plan around
The import runs in the background, one row at a time, so a full property takes minutes rather than seconds. Nobody is emailed during this window; every person is simply queued as Pending Invite or a held notice as their row finishes. You can close the panel and carry on working. The report email arrives when the last row is done.
The importer itself has no schedule and no way to hold anything back further, because it already holds everything back by default. The lever you have is when you press Bulk Invite, which can be the same day or weeks later.