Import your clients, jobs and invoices from Studio Ninja
Move your CRM history across — contacts, pipeline and invoice history — and see exactly what will land before anything is written.
Studio Ninja has no way to connect two systems directly, so this import works from the files Studio Ninja gives you. You export them there, drop them here, and check what will happen before anything is written.
Getting the files out of Studio Ninja
| Export | Where in Studio Ninja | How it arrives |
|---|---|---|
| Clients | Clients tab → Export clients | Downloads straight away as a CSV |
| Leads & jobs | Leads or Jobs tab → Export Leads/Jobs | Emailed to you as a ZIP, up to an hour later |
| Payments | Payments tab → Export payments | Downloads as CSV or XLS — choose CSV |
The export dialog lets you narrow it down. Choose All payments, All time and tick every column — anything you leave out is simply missing from your invoice history here, and there's no way to fill it in later except by exporting again.
Running the import
- Drop the files in. You can do all three at once, or one at a time. Drop the leads/jobs ZIP as-is — the CSVs are pulled out of it for you.
- Press Check files. Nothing is written yet: this reads the files and tells you how many clients, jobs and invoices would come across, and what it can't read.
- Read the summary. It names anything ambiguous — an invoice whose instalments don't add up, a row with no email — so you can fix it in Studio Ninja and re-export if you'd rather.
- Press Import into LumiHQ.
Imported records are matched back to where they came from, so re-running the same files updates them rather than making a second copy. Fill in the blanks only adds details you don't already have — a missing phone number, an address — and brings invoice payment status up to date. Neither option ever replaces something you've edited here.
Where everything lands
| Studio Ninja | Here |
|---|---|
| Clients | Clients — including company, business number and postal address |
| Leads | Shoots, at the Lead or Enquiry stage |
| Jobs | Shoots, at the stage matching their Studio Ninja status |
| Payments | Money — one invoice per invoice ID, with its payment schedule and paid dates |
Your contracts, quotes and questionnaires are exported as PDF documents, not data, so they can't become editable records here — keep the PDFs for your files. There's no export at all for email history, workflows, email templates or calendar entries, so those need rebuilding. Everything else in your Studio Ninja account stays exactly where it is: this import only reads the files you upload.
My dates came in wrong — the day and month are swapped.
Studio Ninja writes dates day-first, but Excel rewrites them in your computer's locale if the file has been opened and saved. The importer works the order out from the file itself wherever it can — any date past the 12th of a month settles it — and only falls back to the Day first / Month first setting when every date in the file is ambiguous. Delete the imported records, switch the setting, and re-check the files.
A client appeared with no phone number or address.
That client was referenced by a job or payment row but wasn't in the clients export, so a record was created from just the name and email on that row. Import the clients CSV too and choose Fill in the blanks to complete them.
My invoice numbers changed.
Invoice numbers are unique per account here. Where a Studio Ninja number was already in use, the invoice was given the next free one, and the import summary lists every invoice this happened to alongside its original Studio Ninja reference.