How Do I Import Users Initial Brought Forward Balances?

Starting Vacation Tracker mid-year? You'll likely want to load in the days each User carried over from their previous PTO system. That's the Initial Brought Forward balance — set it once, then accruals and rollover handle themselves from there.

What "Initial Brought Forward" Means

From the Vacation Tracker import page itself: "Initial Brought Forward is the leave balance a User has carried over (rolled over) from last year, in which Vacation Tracker wasn't a part of your organization. Note that you can only edit the Initial Brought Forward leave balance, while the available leave you can bring forward in the following years will be calculated by Vacation Tracker."

In other words: it's a one-time entry of what each User had banked the day before you started using Vacation Tracker. From there, Vacation Tracker handles all subsequent rollovers automatically based on each Leave Policy's brought-forward settings.

Before You Start

Only Admins can run this import. Make sure all your Users are added and active, and that all your Leave Types are configured before you upload — the import looks them up by exact name.

Steps

1. Sign in at app.vacationtracker.io as an Admin.
2. In the left menu, expand Workspace Settings and click Bulk Uploads.
3. On the Bulk Uploads page, click View on the Initial Brought Forward card.
4. Click Download Template to grab a file with the correct headers.
5. Open the template, fill in one row per User per Leave Type, and save.
6. Back on the Initial Brought Forward page, click Start Import.
7. Walk through the wizard: drop or select your file → Select header row → Match Columns → Validate data → Confirm.

Required Fields

All three fields are mandatory:

One row per User per Leave Type. If someone is brought forward for both Vacation and Sick Days, they get two rows.

The 4-Step Wizard

1. Initial Brought Forward — drop your file or click Select file. Accepts .xlsx, .xls, .csv.
2. Select header row — confirm the first row of your file is the header.
3. Match Columns — map your file's headers to Vacation Tracker fields. With our template, columns match automatically.
4. Validate data — fix any rows the wizard flags in red, then click Confirm.