New: safe student re-imports with duplicate review

Placement rosters are never finished in one sitting. A coordinator uploads the first list in spring, refreshes it after late enrollments, and pulls one more export the week before school starts. Until now, that second upload came with a quiet worry: would Shibutz duplicate students who were already on the roster? That worry is gone.

What's new

Shibutz now checks every uploaded row against the students already on the roster before anything is saved, and it keeps an optional external student ID so re-imports match the right person.

• Map an External ID column from your SIS (student number, SIS ID, or state ID) and Shibutz remembers it on each student.
• The import preview surfaces possible duplicates with the imported values shown next to what is already on the roster.
• For each match you choose Update existing, Skip, or Add as new, one at a time or all at once.
• An import summary shows the planned outcome before you commit: new, updated, skipped, duplicates still needing a decision, plus gender, school, and support-needs counts.

Why it matters

Duplicate students quietly wreck a placement. Two copies of the same child split friend requests, throw off gender and support-needs balance, and send a teacher chasing a name that appears twice. The fix used to be manual cleanup after the fact. Now the decision happens up front, while you can still see the evidence.

External IDs do the heavy lifting. When a student number travels with the roster, Shibutz recognizes the same child even if the office edited a name or fixed a typo between exports. When no ID is present, it falls back to a careful match on name plus school and gender, so a common name at two different schools is never treated as one person.

Nothing is overwritten by accident. External-ID matches default to an update because they are almost certainly the same student; weaker name-only matches wait for you to decide. The import stays blocked until every flagged duplicate has a clear choice, which keeps a rushed upload from silently changing a record.

Getting started

Open your dashboard, choose a class list, and go to Students. Click Import Students, upload your CSV or Excel export, and include a student ID column if your SIS provides one. Review the preview, resolve any possible duplicates, and save.

For the full walkthrough, see Re-importing and Duplicate Handling. New to Shibutz? Sign up free and build balanced class lists from the roster your school already keeps.