Zoho CRM import skipped half your rows? 6 CSV fixes before you try again

Zoho CRM's import wizard reports "skipped" or "failed" rows without telling you much about why. Almost every time, the cause is in the CSV, not in Zoho. Fix these six things first and the retry usually goes clean.

1. Last Name is mandatory for Leads and Contacts

Zoho rejects any Lead or Contact row with an empty Last Name. If you only have a full name, split it in Google Sheets:

=SPLIT(TRIM(A2)," ")

For rows with only one word (a company or a single name), put that word in Last Name rather than leaving it blank.

2. Pick the duplicate-check field before you import

Zoho asks how to handle duplicates and which field to match on. Email is the safest choice, but only if your emails are clean:

=LOWER(TRIM(C2))

Then flag repeats with =COUNTIF($D$2:D2,D2) and keep rows where it equals 1. Mixed-case or padded emails won't match, and you get duplicates anyway.

3. Dates must match the format you choose in the wizard

Zoho asks for the date format during import. A column that mixes 03/12/2026 and 2026-03-12 will fail on some rows. Normalize the whole column in Sheets:

=TEXT(DATEVALUE(E2),"yyyy-mm-dd")

Then choose that same format in the wizard.

4. Picklist values must already exist

Lead Source, Industry, and Lead Status only accept values that exist in the picklist, spelled exactly the same. Zoho either skips the row or drops the value. Add missing options in Setup first, or find-and-replace the CSV to match.

5. Clean phone numbers

Strip everything except digits and a leading plus:

=REGEXREPLACE(F2,"[^0-9+]","")

Consistent phones make dedupe and click-to-call actually work.

6. Save as UTF-8 and keep the file small

Export as UTF-8 CSV so accented names don't turn into José. Very large files can stall the import, so split big lists into chunks of a few thousand rows.

Run a 10-row test first

Import ten rows, open a couple of the new records, and confirm every mapped field filled. Zoho's import history lets you undo a bad import, but it's faster to catch problems on ten rows than on ten thousand.

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