Glovebox has a purpose-built VEVS importer. It is not a generic spreadsheet upload with VEVS written on it: there is a VEVS export template, an importer that recognises VEVS columns automatically, and handling for the specific quirks of VEVS data such as its date format.
This guide covers what transfers, what does not, the order to do things in, and what happens to bookings that are already on the books when you switch.
What transfers
All of the following is handled by the VEVS importer as it exists in Glovebox today.
Reservations. Each VEVS reservation becomes a Glovebox booking, carrying:
- pickup and return date and time;
- the vehicle it was assigned to, and the vehicle type;
- pickup and return locations;
- total, deposit, extras total, bond and GST;
- the hire length in days and the daily rate;
- notes; and
- your original VEVS reference, kept on the booking as its external reference.
Customers. Customer records are created from the reservation rows and matched on email address, so a repeat customer with five past hires ends up as one customer with five bookings, not five duplicate customers. Name, email, phone, date of birth, licence details and address come across where the export includes them.
Second drivers. The VEVS export template includes second driver name and licence, and those come across with the booking.
Payment history. Money already collected in VEVS is recorded against the booking as a captured historical payment, labelled as a VEVS import so it is obvious in your records where it came from. This is a record of what was taken, not a re-charge: the import never moves money and never touches a customer's card.
Booking status. Status is derived from the dates and whether the reservation had payments against it:
| Situation | Imported as |
|---|---|
| Return date already past | Completed, with check-out and check-in stamped from the booking dates |
| Currently on hire (picked up, not yet returned) | Active |
| Pickup date past, no payments recorded | Cancelled |
| Pickup still in the future | Confirmed |
That last rule is worth knowing before you import. A past-dated reservation with no payment against it is treated as a booking that never went ahead. If VEVS holds unpaid reservations that did run, check them after the import.
Your fleet. Vehicles are imported separately, from a CSV of your own. The fleet importer is forgiving about column naming, so a registration column called rego, plate, number_plate, reg or registration is all understood as the same thing.
What does not transfer
Be clear-eyed about this part. Some of it is a Glovebox limitation, some of it is simply not in the export.
Anything not in the VEVS export. The importer can only read what the export gives it. The supplied template covers reference, booking id, pickup, return, vehicle type, assigned car, total, deposit, customer identity and contact details, licence, address, pickup and return locations, notes, and second driver. Anything outside that list does not come across.
Uploaded documents and images. Licence scans, signed agreements, damage photos and vehicle images are not part of the CSV export and are not imported.
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.
Historical Xero sync. Imported bookings are deliberately excluded from the Xero sync. This is intentional: your migrated back-catalogue is already in your accounting system from when the money was originally taken, and re-syncing it would create duplicate invoices. Bookings created in Glovebox after the cutover sync normally.
Your VEVS pricing rules and settings. Rates, seasonal loadings, minimum hire lengths, extras and terms are set up fresh in Glovebox. This is usually a good thing, because Glovebox's pricing rules do not map one-to-one onto VEVS's, but it does mean it is a setup task rather than an import.
[REVIEW] The list above is drawn from what the Glovebox importer accepts. Whether VEVS can export more than the supplied template covers, and whether VEVS offers a documents or images export at all, has not been verified. Confirm with a current VEVS account before publishing.
[REVIEW] Confirm whether VEVS-side data can be exported by an operator directly or whether it requires a request to VEVS support, and what turnaround VEVS gives for that.
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 exact export template to paste into 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 automatically and pre-fill the column mapping;
- detect the date format, including VEVS's
DD.MM.YYYY, 12hformat, 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 import 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 a handful of bookings against VEVS, and confirm dates read the way you expect. Pay particular attention to any booking near today's date, because that is where the status rules above bite.
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.
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 if something is wrong, because bookings are deduplicated on the VEVS reference. Re-importing the same file will not create a second copy of a reservation that is already in.
What happens to bookings that are already on the books
This is the question that decides when you can switch, so it is worth being specific.
Future bookings come across as live bookings. A reservation with a pickup date after your cutover imports as Confirmed, with its deposit and payment history recorded. You run it from Glovebox: handover, bond, return, the lot.
Bookings currently on hire come across as Active. A vehicle that is out right now imports as on hire, with its check-out stamped from the booking's pickup date, so the return can be completed in Glovebox.
Past bookings come across as history. Completed hires import as Completed. They are there for customer history and reporting rather than to be worked on.
Balances still owing. The imported booking knows its total and what has been paid, so a balance still owing is visible in Glovebox. Because payment history imports as a historical record rather than a live payment method, you collect a remaining balance the same way you would for any Glovebox booking: send the customer a payment link, or take it at the counter.
[REVIEW] A customer's saved card in VEVS lives with VEVS's payment gateway, not in the export, so a stored card cannot be migrated and the customer has to pay through a fresh Glovebox link. This is near-certainly correct but has not been confirmed against VEVS. Verify before publishing.
Deposits already taken stay taken. You are not asking anyone to pay twice. The imported payment history is what makes the remaining balance calculate correctly.
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. This is usually the longest part, because it is the part that needs your judgement rather than a file.
- Booking export, import and reconciliation: two to three hours, most of it checking rather than waiting.
- Website or widget: anywhere from an hour for the embed widget to 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. There is no need to do it in one sitting, and no reason to switch until you have reconciled.
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.