What are member IDs and do I need to supply them?¶

Related Topics:¶

How do I add new user record(s) onto my online community?

How do I transfer my data to Potentiality for upload?

A member ID is normally a series of numbers, letters or both that uniquely identifies a member on your database, most commonly a student ID or a reference number. Not all schools assign a number to their pupils but your existing database should have a unique ID for each record (perhaps ask your IT team if you are not sure how to locate this).  We would strongly recommend that you include this field when importing your data onto Potentiality for the reasons below:

1. You can locate members of your database using this ID either separately or in bulk within Potentiality.
2. If you are providing or uploading data that you would like to be added to a record(s) that already exist on the system, including this ID number will allow the system to match these uploaded records with the original records.
3. You can cross-reference your data within Potentiality and the data within your other database to ensure that it matches correctly/all relevant data has been taken across.

NOTE: If you do not currently have unique IDs within your existing Non-Potentiality database, this is not a cause for concern; all records imported/added onto any of our sites will be automatically assigned a Potentiality system code (highlighted in red below), which serves a similar purpose.

However, if you are sending us a file to import and you wish to record a relationship between two or more user records, you will need to supply member IDs for each record (that has a relationship) so that we can use those IDs to connect the records together.

The ID you provide can be numbers, letters or both but MUST be unique. See Bulk Uploading New Members for more information.

What if I'm providing a template which consists of numerous spreadsheets?¶

If you are providing us with a template of new members that consist of a number of spreadsheets (e.g. 1 for pupils, another for contact details and so on) and the only reason that an ID number is required is to tie your own spreadsheets to one another so that our engineers know which data accompanies which record, you can use whichever ID number you like e.g. the number assigned by your school database system (as long as it’s a number that is unique to each record).

However, if the records already exist within Potentiality then it's important that you supply the ID number that uniquely identifies those records within Potentiality to avoid duplicates being created.

We hope that you found this page useful. If you have any questions then please contact us. We are happy to help in any way that we can.

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