Glovebox knows what a VEVS export looks like. You still use the standard booking importer, but it recognises the VEVS layout on sight, pre-fills the column mapping, and understands VEVS's DD.MM.YYYY date format, so you are not matching columns by hand.
This guide covers what transfers, what does not, the order to do things in, and what happens to bookings already on the books when you switch.
The short version of the hard part: your bookings and customers come across. Money already collected does not. Plan for that before you go live, not after — there is a section on it below.
What transfers
The importer reads these from your file:
- your VEVS booking reference, kept on the booking as its external reference;
- customer first name, last name, email and phone;
- pickup and return date and time;
- the vehicle;
- pickup and return locations;
- the booking total;
- booking status; and
- notes.
Customers are matched on email, case-insensitively, so a repeat customer with five past hires ends up as one customer with five bookings rather than five duplicates. Where no customer with that email exists, one is created from the name, email and phone in the row.
Hire length is worked out from the pickup and return dates rather than imported.
Anything you mapped as extras is appended to the booking's internal notes as text, so the information is kept and readable, but it does not become priced extras.
What does not transfer
Be clear-eyed about this part.
Payment history — this is the big one. The importer creates no payment records. An imported booking shows its full total as still owing, even where the customer paid a deposit in VEVS months ago. Nothing is lost from your accounts, but Glovebox does not know the money arrived, so it will treat the booking as unpaid until you tell it otherwise. See "Balances and deposits" below.
Deposit, bond, GST, daily rate and extras totals. Only the booking total comes across. The rest are set by your Glovebox pricing rules, or entered per booking.
Date of birth, licence details and address. Customer records come across with name, email and phone only.
Second drivers. Not imported.
Uploaded documents and images. Licence scans, signed agreements, damage photos and vehicle images are not part of a CSV import.
Your VEVS website and its content. Glovebox includes its own booking site themes and an embeddable booking widget, but page content, blog posts and images are not migrated.
Your VEVS pricing rules and settings. Rates, seasonal loadings, minimum hire lengths, extras and terms are set up fresh in Glovebox. Glovebox's pricing rules do not map one-to-one onto VEVS's, so this is a setup task rather than an import.
Saved cards. A customer's stored card lives with VEVS's payment gateway, not in an export, and the import never stores a card. A customer paying a remaining balance pays through a fresh Glovebox payment link.
Historical Xero sync. Imported bookings are deliberately excluded from the Xero sync, because your migrated back-catalogue is already in your accounting system from when the money was originally taken, and re-syncing would create duplicate invoices. Bookings created in Glovebox after the cutover sync normally.
How booking status is decided
If you map a status column, the preview step lets you match each status value in your file to a Glovebox status, so you decide how "confirmed" or "on hire" is read rather than leaving it to a guess.
Where a row has no usable status, Glovebox works it out from the dates:
| Situation | Imported as |
|---|---|
| Return date already past | Completed |
| Pickup date still in the future | Confirmed |
| Picked up but not yet returned | Active |
Cancelled reservations are worth a moment's thought: unless you map them, a cancelled VEVS booking with past dates imports as Completed, which will overstate your history. Map the status column if your export has one.
The cutover sequence
Do these in order. The importer matches vehicles and locations by name, so the fleet and branches have to exist before the bookings arrive or there is nothing to match against.
1. Set up your workspace. Sign in, add your team, set your business details.
2. Add your locations. Every branch or pickup point you use, named the way they are named in VEVS. Matching the naming saves you work at step 5.
3. Import your fleet. Upload your vehicle CSV. Check each vehicle's rego, type and daily rate landed correctly.
4. Set up pricing. Base daily rates, then any seasonal loadings, length discounts, minimum hire lengths and extras. Quote a few test dates and check the numbers against what VEVS would have quoted.
5. Export from VEVS and import your bookings. In Glovebox, open Settings → Import & migrate → Migrate from VEVS. That page gives you the export template to use in the VEVS "Export Reservations" screen, which produces a CSV shaped the way the importer expects.
Then upload it under Import bookings. The importer will:
- recognise the VEVS layout and pre-fill the column mapping;
- read VEVS's
DD.MM.YYYYdate format, with a manual override if it guesses wrong; - suggest a match for each distinct vehicle and location value in the file, which you can bulk-approve rather than confirming one at a time;
- show you a preview before anything is written; and
- let you save the mapping, so a second run does not need remapping.
6. Check the preview properly. This is the step worth slowing down on. Look at the row count, spot-check bookings against VEVS, and confirm dates read the way you expect.
7. Run the import. It runs in the background and reports what it created.
8. Reconcile. Compare booking counts and upcoming pickups against VEVS. Check that a few known repeat customers came through as single customer records. Check deposits and balances specifically — see below.
9. Point bookings at Glovebox. Either publish a Glovebox booking site, or embed the booking widget into your existing website. Keep VEVS reachable but stop taking new bookings through it.
10. Switch over. Once you are confident, take VEVS out of the booking path.
You can safely re-run the import. Bookings are deduplicated on the VEVS reference, so re-importing the same file will not create a second copy of a reservation that is already in.
A row with no customer email will not import. The importer reports it rather than guessing, so check your export includes email for every reservation.
Balances and deposits
Because payment history does not come across, an imported booking shows its full total as owing even where a deposit was paid. Before you go live:
- Pull a list of future bookings that have deposits against them in VEVS.
- Decide how you want them to read in Glovebox — recording the deposit against the booking, or adjusting the balance.
- Do not let the automated balance requests go out until you have, or customers will be asked for money they have already paid.
If you have more than a handful of deposit-paid future bookings, this is the part worth talking through with us rather than working out alone. See "Getting help with it" below.
What happens to bookings that are already on the books
Future bookings come across as live bookings. You run them from Glovebox: handover, bond, return, the lot. Their balance needs the check above.
Bookings currently on hire come across as on hire, so the return can be completed in Glovebox.
Past bookings come across as history, for customer history and reporting rather than to be worked on.
Expected timeline
[REVIEW] These figures are an estimate written from the shape of the work, not from observed migrations. Replace with real numbers once a few operators have been through it, or remove this section.
For a typical single-branch operator with a fleet under about 30 vehicles:
- Workspace, locations and fleet import: half a day.
- Pricing setup and testing: half a day to a day. Usually the longest part, because it needs your judgement rather than a file.
- Booking export, import and reconciliation: two to three hours, most of it checking rather than waiting.
- Balance and deposit reconciliation: depends entirely on how many future bookings have deposits against them.
- Website or widget: an hour for the embed widget, or a few days if you are launching a new booking site.
Realistically, a couple of working days spread over a week or two, running both systems in parallel for part of it.
Getting help with it
You do not have to do this alone, and you should not have to work out the VEVS export format yourself. The Settings → Import & migrate area walks through it, and if a file is not importing cleanly, get in touch with the file and we will look at it.
[REVIEW] Whether a VEVS operator can run the reservations export themselves or has to request it from VEVS support, and what turnaround VEVS gives, has not been confirmed. Check with a current VEVS account.