Assets & Inventory

Bulk import

The bulk importer loads an existing estate of assets into lazyit from a single CSV or JSON file. It is built for the first day of a new instance, when your inventory still lives in a spreadsheet or a legacy tool. You reach it from Settings → Bulk import (it’s an occasional admin action, so it lives in Settings rather than the main sidebar).

The importer is administrator-only — it needs the import:run permission, which administrators hold by default. If you can’t see it, ask an administrator to run the import for you.

What you can import today. Assets, the people each one is assigned to, and that assignment. When your file has an “assigned to” column, the importer creates the person and hands them the asset (see Assign assets to people below). Consumables and history import are deliberately not available yet and are noted as coming later in the wizard.

The flow at a glance

The importer is a guided wizard. Nothing is written to your data until the final commit step, and even then every row is checked one more time before it is saved.

Upload — pick what you’re importing (Assets) and choose your file.
Summary — confirm the detected record count, encoding and columns.
Mapping — go column by column: send each one to a lazyit field, save it as a custom field, or ignore it.
Preview — a dry run that validates every row without writing anything.
Conflicts — resolve any references that matched (or didn’t match) existing records.
Commit — the import runs, and you get a result report.

You can go Back at any step before the commit to change your answers.

1. Upload your file

Export your spreadsheet as CSV (UTF-8), or provide a JSON array of objects. Each row (or object) becomes one asset.

.xlsx files are not accepted — export them to CSV first.
The file is parsed in the background; this usually takes a few seconds.
Date-only columns and any created/updated/deleted timestamp columns are rejected — this first phase imports the current state of an asset, not its history.

2. Confirm the summary

After parsing, the importer shows the record count, the detected encoding, the delimiter and the list of columns it found. Use this to confirm the file parsed the way you expect before you spend time mapping. If it found zero rows, go back and check the file.

3. Map your columns

Mapping is column-first: the importer lists every column from your file, each as its own card showing the column name and a few example values pulled from your file, so you always know what you’re looking at before you decide where it goes.

Heads up — this screen shows your real data. The example values are taken straight from the file, so they can include employee data such as names and emails. Nothing is written anywhere until the final commit; the values are only shown to you, the operator running the import.

For each column, open it and pick one target from the dropdown:

A lazyit field, grouped by entity:
- Asset — Name (required), Status (required), Serial number, Asset tag, Company, Purchase date, Warranty end, Model and Location.
- Model — Manufacturer and Category for the asset models the import creates (see Model brand and category below).
- Person — the person the asset is assigned to: Name, Email, Employee no., Username, Job title, Department and Supervisor (see Assign assets to people below).
Create a custom field… — for a column with no native home (RAM, IMEI, screen size, cost, an external URL…). You give it a name, and its value is saved to the asset’s details (specs). A custom field is stored only on rows that actually have a value — empty cells add nothing.
Ignore — drop the column. Empty and irrelevant columns default to Ignore, so a wide export with dozens of unused columns isn’t a wall of work; you only touch the ones that matter.

A few fields behave specially:

Name and Status are required: you must map a column to each before you can continue.
Status values are reconciled inside that column’s card — each distinct status value in your file maps to a lazyit status (for example active → OPERATIONAL, retired → RETIRED). Common synonyms are filled in for you; change any of them.
Serial number is optional but important: it is the asset’s only natural key. Map it and a re-upload won’t create duplicates for those rows. Without it, a re-upload is not de-duplicated.
Asset tag — a tag from your file is used as-is; a blank one is auto-assigned later if your instance has an asset-tag scheme enabled.
Model and Location are references, matched to existing records by name (see Conflicts).
Company is an optional grouping label, set as-is from your file (a Company / Empresa column is recognized automatically). It groups and filters assets — it is not an access control.

The importer pre-fills a best guess for each column, but it never decides for you — you confirm every column, and nothing is dropped silently. The guess understands more than exact English headers: it recognises Spanish and Snipe-IT-style names too (for example Nombre, Número de serie, Asignado a, Modelo), so a typical export lands mostly pre-mapped. You still confirm each column — the auto-detection only proposes the target.

Model brand and category

A model is created from its name. To have the import create models, map a column to Model (under the Asset group). Mapping only Manufacturer or Category does not create a model — those two only enrich a model that already comes from a mapped Model column. The category is attached through the model, not directly to the asset.

When the import creates a new Model, it needs a manufacturer and a category. You can set these two ways:

Per row — map a column to Manufacturer or Category in the dropdown, and each model takes its value from that row.
For every model — if your file has no such column (or all your assets are the same brand), pin a single Manufacturer and/or Category in the Model brand and category box; it applies to every model the import creates. A mapped column always wins over a pinned value.
- For Category, the box defaults to Existing: pick a category that already exists so every model links to it — no typo, no accidental new category. Flip the toggle to Constant to type a free value instead (it’s still found-or-created by name on import).
- Manufacturer is free text (there’s no manufacturer list to pick from), so it’s always a constant.

Assign assets to people

Map any Person field and the import will, for each row, find or create that person and assign the asset to them — the assignment is recorded the same way it would be in the app, with history.

An imported person has no login. They are a directory person: a real entry in your Users list (badged Directory), but without an account in your identity provider. They exist so the asset has an owner on record; they cannot sign in until they get an account.
To assign, map the person’s Name and one identity key. Name (the Assigned to column) is required to assign an asset, plus at least one of Email, Employee no. or Username to know who a row belongs to (and to avoid creating the same person twice). If you map any Person field, the wizard won’t let you continue until both the Name and an identity key are mapped. A row that’s missing the name is flagged as an invalid row in the preview, so you fix it before committing — it never fails silently at the end. A row with a name but no identity key imports the asset unassigned, with a warning.
They link to a real account automatically — only with a matching email. When that person later signs in through your identity provider (OIDC) using the same verified email, lazyit links the two: the directory entry becomes their account and the Directory badge disappears. A person imported without a real email never links automatically — there’s no email to match on. Promote them by hand (next point) when they need to sign in.
You can create their account now. An administrator can open the person’s page and choose Create OIDC account to provision them in the identity provider immediately, instead of waiting for a login. The identity provider requires a real email, so the button is disabled until the person has one — edit the person and add a real email first.

The asset always imports either way; only the assignment depends on identifying the person.

4. Preview (the dry run)

The dry run validates, coerces and resolves every row — writing nothing. You get:

A count of valid and invalid rows.
Per-row outcomes, with the exact validation error for each invalid row (so you can fix the file).
Asset-tag collisions — any tag in your file that already belongs to a live asset is flagged here, never silently dropped.

Because the preview runs the same checks the commit will, what you see is what you’ll get.

5. Resolve conflicts

When your file references a model or a location by name, the importer looks for an existing record. For each distinct value it shows you the matches it found, the blast radius (how many rows use that value, with a few example row numbers), and asks you to choose one of four outcomes:

Link to an existing record (match) — use a live record that already exists.
Restore an archived record (restore) — bring back a soft-deleted (archived) record and link to it.
Create a new record (create) — make a new one. Only offered when no live match exists. The new record is created with sensible defaults you can edit afterward.
Skip — leave unlinked (skip) — import the rows without that link.

lazyit never guesses for you. When more than one record matches a value, the conflict is marked ambiguous and you must pick the specific record — the importer will not auto-select one. You resolve each distinct value once, and that choice applies to every row that shares it.

6. Commit and the result

When the plan is set, the import runs in the background. It is chunked and resumable, and it follows a keep-partial rule:

Successful rows are kept — a problem with one row never rolls back the rows that already succeeded.
If a value was taken by someone else between the preview and the commit, that row is recorded as a failure (not silently dropped), and the rest continue.

The result report shows how many rows were created, failed and skipped, plus the import run id for your audit trail. If some rows failed, fix them in your file and run the importer again — already-imported rows are skipped on a re-run (when a serial number is mapped).

Good to know

It’s additive and audited. The importer only creates and links; it never deletes or overwrites your existing assets. Every created asset gets a history entry attributed to you.
Sessions expire. An in-progress import session is kept for 24 hours and then discarded. The audit ledger of a completed import is permanent.
Permissions still apply at commit. Beyond import:run, creating a new model or location during a conflict needs the matching write permission; the importer checks this before writing anything.