· 2 min read
Moving your 201 files out of spreadsheets, without retyping anything
Most Philippine SMEs keep their 201 files in a workbook that has grown for years. You can move that into Cayamanan today, columns and all, and the import will do the tedious part of the mapping for you.
iBAS Software FR
The 201 file is the foundation of everything else in HR. It is also, in most Philippine small and mid-sized businesses, a spreadsheet that somebody inherited, with columns added whenever a new requirement appeared and a naming scheme that made sense to a person who has since left.
Employee records are the part of Cayamanan that is finished and usable today. This is how to move.
Bring the workbook as it is
Do not clean it first. Import accepts CSV, TSV and xlsx, and the mapping step is designed for exactly the workbook you already have, not an idealised one.
You will be shown your columns beside the fields they appear to belong to. Where the match is obvious, it is already made. Where a column is called something like "SSS No." or "Tax ID" or "Date Hired (mm/dd)", the AI-assisted mapping proposes the field and you confirm or change it. Columns that map to nothing stay unmapped rather than being silently dropped.
What lands where
The 201 file in Cayamanan covers personal details, government IDs, family and dependants, employment background, onboarding, and documents. Organization structure sits alongside it: departments, positions, locations and cost centers.
If your spreadsheet has a "Department" column with nine spellings of the same three departments, the import surfaces that before it writes anything. Fixing it once at import is a great deal cheaper than discovering it later in a headcount report.
Then let the assistant do the tedium
Once the records are in, they are reachable through the same actions the screens use, which means the assistant can work on them. Asking for everyone whose contract ends this quarter, or adding a training record to one person, or correcting a misspelled middle name across a set of rows, is a sentence rather than a session of clicking.
Every one of those goes through the same permission check as the equivalent screen, and anything high risk still needs a person to approve it.
What is not ready yet
Contracts, compensation and payroll are not built. If you are hoping to run your August payroll on this, you cannot, and the status section on the home page keeps an honest list of exactly what exists.
What you can do is stop keeping the record of your people in a file that one person understands. That part is ready, it is free, and it is the prerequisite for everything that comes after.