Get your Excel customer list onto a map

By Manuel Ober · 6 September 2026 · 5 min read

The list everybody has

Almost every field sales rep has an Excel file with all their customers. Name, address, phone number, somewhere a column with the last visit, somewhere another with notes. It was inherited from a predecessor and added to over the years in hotel rooms.

There is one thing the list does not know: where the customers are. Row 47 and row 48 sit one under the other. Whether those two customers are 500 metres or 80 kilometres apart, you cannot see. On a map you see it at once. This guide shows how to get the list there and what usually goes wrong.

Step 1: Tidy the addresses

A map needs addresses a program can read. This is where most lists fail. Three rules help.

One item per column. Street with house number, postcode and town each get their own column. If they have to stay in one cell, keep the usual order: “Hauptstraße 12, 3300 Amstetten” usually works, “Amstetten, Hauptstr. 12 (rear entrance)” does not.

No extras in the address. “Second floor”, “c/o Dr Huber” and “entrance from the car park” belong in a notes column. In the address they throw the conversion off.

Always include the postcode. In Austria, 17 villages are called Neudorf, spread across five provinces. With the postcode the address is unambiguous. Without it, the customer easily lands in the wrong province.

For 300 customers this takes about an hour. You only do it once.

Step 2: Remove duplicates and dead entries

You will come across both while tidying: the same customer twice, once as “Apotheke zum Adler” and once as “Adler-Apotheke”. A business that closed three years ago. A contact who retired long ago.

Sort that out now. If your list has 300 customers and 40 of them no longer exist, every figure you derive from it is wrong. Then customers who no longer exist sit on your due list.

Step 3: Turn addresses into map points

Turning an address into a point on the map is called geocoding. You do not need to know the word, but you should know three things.

• It does not work for every address. New housing estates, addresses with an extra such as “Top 4”, or businesses with only a PO box are not always found. With 300 addresses, expect ten to fifteen that you place by hand.
• “Roughly” is dangerous. Some tools drop the point in the town centre when they cannot find the street. The customer then sits three kilometres from their own premises, and you only notice when you get there.
• Every conversion needs an internet connection. The addresses are sent to a map service for this. Ask beforehand what data goes with them.

The result is one point per customer. Only with these points can a route planner work out drive times.

Step 4: What you see on the map for the first time

Anyone who sees their list on a map for the first time usually gets three surprises.

The territory is not round. It has a dense core and long arms. The arms cost the most kilometres and bring the fewest visits.

Customers who sit close together were never visited together. Three customers in the same town are 200 rows apart on the list, because they were added in different years.

Some customers are closer to the neighbouring territory than to the core of your own. That is a question for how territories are divided, and the map raises it for the first time.

Step 5: Colour by what is due

A map with 300 identical dots does not help much. It gets interesting when the colour says who is due: red for overdue, amber for due soon, green for still fine.

For that, each customer needs two details: the last visit and the visit cycle, meaning the gap you want between two visits. Both are usually somewhere in your list, often as free text in a notes column. Enter them once, cleanly, in their own columns, and the tool works out what is due by itself.

How a coloured map becomes a week is in the guide Route planning in field sales.

Where it usually goes wrong

• The list is copied instead of tidied. Then the errors sit in two files.
• A tool wants the customer list in its cloud. A customer list usually belongs to your employer, often under a confidentiality agreement. Find out beforehand where it ends up and who can see it.
• The map does not replace the list. The list knows the history, the map knows the location. You need both.

How trakki does it

You upload your customer list as an Excel file (.xlsx). trakki recognises the columns and you confirm briefly. There is a template to download in the app. Name and address are enough, you do not need coordinates. If trakki cannot find an address exactly, it marks the match as approximate instead of quietly putting it in the town centre.

The map colours every customer by due date. The address search runs through Stadia Maps and only finds Austrian addresses. The address goes there. If you type a customer's name in trakki, for example when you add them by hand, the name goes there too. Notes never do. Your customer list lives on your phone, not on a trakki server. You do not need a trakki account.

You can look at trakki in your browser with sample customers. More on the home page.

Frequently asked questions

Do I have to rebuild my Excel list?

Only the addresses. Everything else can stay. Street, postcode and town should be separate, or at least unambiguous, and there should be no extras inside the address. For trakki it has to be an .xlsx file.

What about customers without an exact address?

Farms, farm shops or building sites sometimes have no street address. For these you set the map position by hand. That takes about a minute per customer and only has to be done once.

Can my manager see the map?

Only if you show it to them. trakki has no server that holds your customer list. If you sync through a company cloud account, a file sits there that is encrypted with your sync password. Only someone with the password can read it. What you pass on, such as your visits as an Excel file, is your decision.