Improve Appointment Scheduling and Follow-up with the FOS Board Roster Import Program

The FOS board roster is used to indicate the appointment caller and/or co-broker agent for listing showings. To help build and maintain this roster, a new import command has been added to the FOS system.

The new command, “Import Board Roster…”, is accessed from the File pull down menu in FOS. This new command will add new records to the FOS roster table from an ASCII (character) file that is created from MS Excel or other programs that might be offered by your MLS system. This file must have a certain format which is defined later.

How to operate the Import Roster from File command:

When you start the command the above dialog is presented. There is a space to enter the import file name and a “Start Import” button that will tell the program to test read the import file.

Above, use the folder tool to locate or just type in the import file name. 

Next, click the Start Import button. This will tell the program to attempt to read the header and all data records of the import program and indicate if the file appears to be correctly formatted.

The above form shows a sample of a successful read of an import file. The program will show how many records it was able to read and how many format errors it found in the file.  Note that a scrolling window allows viewing of each roster name read.

If the import program was able to read the import file, the operator will click the “Next” button in order to perform the import to the FOS roster. If the import program was not able to read this file, the program will suggest what the formatting problems are so they can be fixed.

Import to roster is completed – above messages will indicate how many of the agent/broker records it was able to actually add to the FOS roster. Shown for each record is the agent/broker name along with their ID. Normally, the ID is the MLS ID of the agent/broker.

If the record already exists in the FOS roster it is not added and this is indicated as an error. In the above example, 630 records were imported and 2 were not. The operator can scroll up the record list to locate the “error’” record to view the name and ID of the record(s) not added. Most often, these will be records whose agent/broker ID was found to already be in the FOS roster.

Once the import is completed, the added agent/brokers are available for use when entering appointments.

How the Import File must be formatted:

The import file must have format that consists of a “header record” which indicates the roster items you have in your file, followed by records of agent/broker names, ID’s, and other information.

If you have a list of agent/brokers that had their MLS ID, the agent name, the agent phone number, and their company name it might look like this in Excel:

For each agent/broker there are 4 items of information.

Next, you must then create the header record so the FOS import program will know what each item is.  This header record must use certain item names or the import will not proceed. The header names that are available are:

szAgentCode                        this is the agent/broker ID – usually the MLS ID

szName                                  this is the agent’s name should be listed last name then first name

szCompanyName                 this is the company name of the agent. Often the company MLS ID is used for the company name

szAgentTelephone              agent’s phone number – can have just numeric digits and also dashes or parenthesis

szStreet                                 the agent’s street address – usually of the office

szCity                                     the agent’s city – usually of the office

szState                                  the agent’s state abbreviation – usually of the office

szZip                                     the agent’s zip code – usually of the office

szEmail1                                the agent’s email address

szOfficeCode                        the company office code where the agent works

To setup the header record the 4-item per record example, the header row would be inserted as illustrated above in row #1.

When header and agent/broker record entry is complete, the next step is to export the data to an ASCII file. When this is done, a “delimiter” character is placed between each item (column) so that the import program knows when each item starts and ends.

Above is an example of using Excel – File à “Save As” command to save the spreadsheet  A common ASCII format is to use the tab delimited – this means that a tab character is placed in the file to separate each item.

If you were to use notepad to view this file it would appear as above.  The first record is the header record. Each name in the header is separated by a tab character. The following records are the agent/broker data records – each item of each record is also separated by a tab character.

Two other characters can be used as a delimiter: the semi-colon ( ; ), or the bar ( | ). Only one of the three delimiter types can be used in an import file.

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