How to migrate your Excel portfolio to Prestafolio (without losing anything)

You have your portfolio in a spreadsheet, or worse, spread across a notebook and your own memory, and the idea of switching systems scares you. It is not a silly fear: what happens to your clients' history? Do you have to type in every loan from scratch, installment by installment? Will the switch throw your cash off balance on day one? All three questions have the same answer, and it is no. You bring your whole portfolio in, exactly as it stands today (in one file or several if it is over 200 rows), and keep collecting exactly like you did yesterday.

The two things that actually worry you

Before we walk through how it works, the two full guarantees, because they are what actually matters.

Importing does not touch your cash

Bringing your portfolio in does not put a single peso into or out of your cash drawer, does not require an open shift, and generates no receipt. That money left your pocket before you ever opened this account: counting it again would count it twice. Every loan you import goes straight into your books as what it is, a portfolio you already had, without passing through cash and without asking you for an open shift to do it.

Importing does not affect your client's credit history

This is the one that reassures people the most, and the one explained the least anywhere else. Prestafolio keeps a payment history shared across the platform's lenders (we call it the trust level), and the obvious question is: if I bring in a portfolio with clients who are months behind, do I torch their credit for anyone who looks them up?

No. The platform only scores the behaviour it observes inside Prestafolio, from the moment the loan enters the system, never the history you bring in from outside. That does not change their score or trust level. What does get recorded is that the loan exists (how many loans they have and how much they have borrowed in total), never how they paid before coming in. As far as that shared history goes, a loan you import today with six months of arrears comes in with zero days of arrears, and if your client keeps not paying you that arrears count starts from today, which is correct: that is the only thing the platform could have observed. If they pay on time from here on, that is the only thing that gets recorded in their score. In your own account it is different: the loan comes in with its real arrears from day one, and your own arrears keep running normally.

A loan comes in already in progress, not from zero

This is what makes migrating actually useful: you are not just importing the client's name and the original amount, you are importing WHERE the loan stands today. You tell Prestafolio how many installments your client already paid (or how much they still owe) and the balance is right from day one. If they are on installment 5 of 12, the loan comes in owing exactly the remaining 7, with its next collection date where it belongs. No recreating a half-paid loan as if it had just been born.

Your clients do not get duplicated

If a client already exists in your account (because you registered them before, or because you already brought them in with another loan), the import recognises them by their ID document and LINKS the new loan to that client, instead of creating a duplicate. The ID does not have to be written exactly the same way in both places: "001-1234567-8" and "00112345678" match as the same person. A new client is only created when the document does not exist yet, with whatever data your sheet brings.

If you get it wrong, nothing breaks

You can upload the same file twice without worrying: whatever is already on record gets recognised and skipped, so re-importing the same file duplicates nothing. That is exactly what you need to fix a bad mapping calmly, without holding your breath over whether something doubled up.

One thing you do need to know, so it does not catch you off guard: importing only creates what does not exist yet. If after uploading your portfolio you fix a phone number or an address on your sheet and upload it again, that change does not apply, because that client already exists and importing never updates them. To fix a detail for someone you already brought in, you edit it directly inside Prestafolio.

What you can bring in

It is not just the loan portfolio. Each of these four has its own template:

How it works

1. Download the template for whatever you are bringing in: it carries the exact columns Prestafolio understands, with example rows.
2. Fill it in with your portfolio, in whatever currency you normally use. No converting to cents, Prestafolio takes care of that.
3. Upload it to the importer. Before anything is written you get a row-by-row preview: how many new clients would be created, what balance each loan comes in with, and any row with a problem.
4. Review it and confirm. Only then does anything get written to your account. On the Free plan, the batch is checked against your caps (8 clients, 4 active loans, 4 services); see Your plan limits.

Download the loans template, the clients template, the payments template or the services template, and upload it straight into the importer. If you would rather see the column details and their aliases first, they are in Template format and in How importing works. And if you are still building your sheet by hand, take a look at the Excel template for lenders first.