YEP Roster Loading

What is roster loading?

Once a year the YEP Committee puts together a spreadsheet of the inbound or outbound student cohort. This tool reads that spreadsheet and brings it into the Youth Exchange site, so the committee is not retyping every name and detail by hand.

How it works at a glance

flowchart TD
    A["Committee produces the cohort spreadsheet"] --> B["Open the roster page,
set direction and cohort"]
    B --> C["Copy the header + student rows
and paste them in"]
    C --> D["Check the columns are read
correctly"]
    D --> E["Preview: new, updated,
unchanged, skipped"]
    E --> F["Confirm"]
    F --> G["Committee fills in Club Counsellor
and YEO emails as placements confirm"]

Before you start

Have your cohort spreadsheet open with a header row (column names such as Name, Email, Cohort, Direction, Club and Country) and one row per student.

Loading the roster

1. Go to yep.rotary9660.org.au/youth-exchange/students/import/ and sign in.
2. Set the direction (inbound or outbound) and cohort (the exchange year) for this batch.
3. In your spreadsheet, select the header row plus the student rows, copy them, and paste into the import box. Keep the header row: the importer reads the column names (Name, Email, Cohort, Direction, Club, Country and the like) from it.
   Use the student's own email

   These spreadsheets often have several email columns, for a student, a parent and sometimes a host family. Paste the student's own email as the Email column: that is how the portal matches a student to their reports, travel and wellbeing.

4. Click through to the preview. It shows how many rows are created, updated and skipped. A student already on the roster (matched by email, or by name within the same cohort) is updated, not duplicated, and a blank cell never wipes existing data. Each skipped row states why.
5. Confirm the import.

Club Counsellor and YEO emails

The YEP Committee types the Club Counsellor and YEO email addresses into SharePoint by hand, for each student, as their placement is confirmed. Until both fields are filled in, that student's travel requests cannot be routed to the right approvers.

There is no way around this step. It is deliberate: nothing produces this pairing automatically, so it has to be a person who knows the placement.

Why running it again is safe

You can run the roster import again at any time, for example if the committee sends an updated spreadsheet partway through the year. This will never clear the Club Counsellor or YEO email you have already typed in.

An import only ever writes a field where the spreadsheet has something in it. The spreadsheet has no column for Club Counsellor or YEO email, so it never touches those fields, no matter how many times you run it. Anything the committee has hand-typed stays exactly as it is.

One thing worth checking after every run

Matching an existing student to a row in the spreadsheet is done by email address. If a student's email address changes in the source spreadsheet between one run and the next, the tool cannot tell it is the same person, so it creates a new record instead of updating the old one. The old record keeps the Club Counsellor and YEO email you already typed in; the new one starts blank, and the wellbeing view will then show two entries with the same name with no way to tell which contacts belong to which.

This is easy to catch. After every load, check that the roster count moved by the number the tool reported as created. If it moved by more than that, or if you spot two rows with the same student name, that is the sign an email address changed rather than a genuine new student, and it is worth a quick look before moving on.

Troubleshooting

The columns did not read correctly

Make sure you copied the header row along with the student rows: the importer reads the column names from that first row. If a column mapped to the wrong field, paste again with the header included.

My spreadsheet is a CSV

That is fine: open it, copy the rows and paste them in. There is no file to upload and no need to convert it to Excel.

A lot of rows are showing as skipped

Open the preview and read the reason given next to each skipped row. Common causes are a missing name or a blank required field. Fix the spreadsheet and try again, it is safe to re-run.

I am not sure which Email column to map

Check the column letter shown next to each option against the spreadsheet itself, and pick the one under the student's own name, not a parent's or host family's.

Still stuck? Email support@rotary9660.org.au with a screenshot.