Most tattoo client lists start life as a spreadsheet, and honestly, a spreadsheet is a fine place to start — free, flexible, yours. The problems come later and always in the same order: photos can't live in cells, multi-session pieces sprawl across rows, and one day the sheet has 300 clients and you realize you're the database administrator of a database you hate.
This guide covers both ends: a template that makes the spreadsheet era work better, and the graduation path that makes the eventual move to a CRM a ten-minute import instead of a weekend of retyping.
The template
Download it here: tattoo-client-import-template.csv — open it in Google Sheets or Excel and start filling rows.
The columns, and why these exact ones:
Name, Email, Phone, Instagram, Notes
That's deliberately short. Five columns get maintained; fifteen get abandoned by March. The trick is what goes in them:
- Name — one column, full name. Split first/last columns are a Square-ism that causes import headaches; one column imports everywhere.
- Email — the deduplication key. When you eventually import to any CRM, email is how "Sam" and "Samantha O." get recognized as one person. Chase emails harder than phone numbers.
- Phone — any format; every tool stores it as text.
- Instagram — handle without the @. For many clients this is the real contact channel; record it like one.
- Notes — the working column. Style interests, sizing conversations, deposit history in words, "wants a sleeve eventually." One cell per client, newest note on top, dated: "7/2026: asked about ribs piece, budget ~$1500."
What's not in the template: session-by-session details, photos, deposits-per-sitting. Spreadsheets genuinely can't hold those well — that's not a discipline failure, it's the format's ceiling, and it's the signal to graduate.
Making the spreadsheet era last longer
Three habits stretch the sheet's useful life: dedupe by email once a month (sort the column, squash neighbors), never delete a client — note "moved away 2026" instead, because cover-up questions arrive years later — and keep the file where the shop actually is (a shared Google Sheet beats a laptop file that's never at the front desk).
The graduation moment
You'll know it when it arrives: a deposit question you can't answer from the Notes cell, a healed photo you can't find, a second artist who needs access without six months of merge conflicts. The sheet didn't fail — it graduated you.
The move itself, if you kept anything like the template shape: export/download as CSV, and import it into your CRM of choice. In Stencil it's Clients → Import CSV — the importer auto-detects these column headers (and Square's and Vagaro's), shows a preview, and skips duplicate emails, so running it twice can't double your list. Three hundred clients land in about a minute, and the Notes column comes along intact.
From there, the things the spreadsheet couldn't do start existing: multi-session pieces as projects with photos and per-session deposits, an inquiry queue with a real waitlist, ink logs attached to sessions, and money that adds itself up.
Coming from Square or Vagaro instead of a spreadsheet? Different export quirks, same landing: the Square walkthrough and the Vagaro checklist.
One promise worth demanding from whatever you graduate to, ours included: the door swings both ways. Your client list imported in a minute should export just as fast. A CRM that makes leaving hard is a spreadsheet with a hostage policy.