The spreadsheet is rarely the problem on day one. One person, forty conversations, a tab with names and a column marked "follow up Tuesday". It works. It keeps working until a second person joins, or until the same lead appears twice under a display name they changed last month, and by then nobody trusts the file enough to act on it without opening Telegram to check.
That loss of trust is the real trigger for a migration. Not the row count. A sheet with 3,000 rows that everyone believes is fine. A sheet with 300 rows that two people edit and neither believes is a liability, because the follow-up decisions made from it are guesses.
What the import actually brings over
Connecting a Telegram account turns the people you have open chats with into contact records: display name, username, the internal Telegram identifier that survives a username change, and when the conversation was last active. Contacts arriving through a bot come in the same list from the moment somebody presses start, carrying whatever campaign parameter came with them. The mechanics are covered in importing your Telegram contacts.
The conversations do not come over. No message bodies, no attachments, no archive to search. Scalegram stores contact recency and the link into the real chat, and nothing of what was said. That is a deliberate design decision, explained in never storing conversations, and it is the single thing that surprises people migrating from a sheet where they had been pasting quotes from chats into a notes column.
So a migration is not a copy. It is a rebuild of the parts of your sheet that were about people, with the parts that were about text left in Telegram where they already live.
Which columns to keep and which to delete
Open your file before you open the software. Most sales sheets in this niche have between twelve and twenty columns, and a third of them exist because somebody added them during one busy week in March and nobody has read them since.
Keep the columns that change a decision: the stage the person is at, the reason they have not bought, the amount they said they would deposit, the date of the next action, and the campaign or channel that produced them. Those map onto stages, tags, notes, tasks and the attribution values on a contact record.
Delete the columns that only recorded work rather than informing it. "Messaged 12 Aug", "messaged again 19 Aug", "no reply" and the four columns of a manual follow-up sequence go away, because contact recency is on the record automatically and the sequencing belongs to follow-up rules instead of to your memory.
Anything in your sheet that is a copy of a conversation should not be re-created as a note. If the detail matters after the sale, write the outcome, not the transcript. If it only mattered during the sale, it belongs in Telegram.
Stages first, and keep the list short
The most common migration failure is arriving with fifteen stages because the spreadsheet had fifteen values in its status column. Those values grew one at a time, each one added to describe a single awkward lead, and together they describe nothing.
Five or six stages is usually enough for a Telegram funnel: new, in conversation, objection, ready, paid, and lost. Everything finer than that is a tag. Tags stack, stages do not, and the difference matters because a stage answers "what happens next" while a tag answers "what is true about this person". A lead who is price-sensitive and in Spanish and came from a TikTok angle is one stage and three tags, not one of fifteen invented statuses.
Once the stages exist, the first pass through the imported list is the boring hour that decides everything. Sort by last activity, work down, and put people where they belong. Nobody enjoys this. Teams that skip it end up with a list where every row says "new" and the pipeline reports nothing for the next month.
The two habits that decide whether it sticks
A CRM fails in week two, not week one. The failure is always the same shape: somebody has a conversation in Telegram, moves the deal forward, and does not touch the record. A week later the list disagrees with reality and everyone goes back to the sheet, because at least the sheet was honestly out of date rather than dishonestly current.
Two habits prevent it. The first is that every conversation ends with a stage change or a task, on the spot, in the same minute. The second is that nobody keeps a private copy. If one person still has their own tab, the shared list is not the record and never will be.
The team side of that is a permission question as much as a discipline one. Access is granted per area with read, add, write and delete separated, which is what lets you give a junior closer the ability to move stages without the ability to delete contacts. The setup is covered in teams and permissions.
What a sheet could never do
Worth being specific about the gain, because "it is more organised" is not a reason to move anything.
A spreadsheet cannot tell you which advertisement produced a client, because the campaign parameters never survive the trip into Telegram. A tracking link stores them at the click and writes them onto the contact record, so a purchase six weeks later still knows which angle bought it. The mechanics are in how UTMs are handled.
A spreadsheet also cannot fire a conversion event, cannot verify a deposit against a broker connection before a private group invite goes out, and cannot let an assistant answer at three in the morning in the customer's own language. Those are the reasons to move. Tidiness is a side effect.
A realistic timeline
Connect and import in an afternoon. Spend the following morning on stages and tags. Leave the tracking links, pixels and any checkout or broker connection until the client list is trusted, because attribution built on a pipeline nobody believes produces confident numbers about nothing. Everything gets connected in one place, on the Integrations page, and every other screen only selects what already exists there.
One honest caveat for anyone in the trading niche. Better records do not change the underlying business. Trading carries a high risk of loss for the people at the end of the funnel, and a cleaner pipeline improves your operations rather than their outcomes.
"A spreadsheet is not a system, it is a memory aid, and memory aids stop working the day a second person needs to trust them."
— Roman Onta, Executive Director, SINGUARD
Key Takeaways
- Migrate the columns that change a decision and delete the ones that only recorded activity.
- Five or six stages beat fifteen; anything finer belongs in tags.
- Conversations do not import, because Scalegram stores no message content at all.
- The migration sticks only if nobody keeps a private copy of the list.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I upload my existing spreadsheet directly?
The primary route is connecting the Telegram account and letting the open chats become contacts, then sorting them into stages. Anything from a sheet that is genuinely additional, such as a stage or a deposit note, is worth adding onto the matched record rather than creating a parallel list.
What happens to duplicates from the same person?
Matching is on the person rather than on the connection, so someone who reached you through both a bot and your personal account is one record. A username change does not create a second contact because the internal Telegram identifier stays the same.
Do I lose my chat history when I move?
No. The history stays in Telegram, exactly where it is now. Scalegram never copies it out, and each contact row links straight into the real chat so you open it in the app when you need to read it.
About the Author
Roman Onta is an Executive Director at SINGUARD. He builds the Prop Firm CRM, the Broker CRM, Scalegram and CopySignals side by side with his brother Alex Onta, and he helped on the design of eTrader, the division Alex built and leads. His ground is worldwide payment processing, AML compliance and the corporate structures brokers are built on, work the two of them carry together, shaped by executive roles in the UAE and international corporates. He lives and works in Dubai for most of the year. Meet the executive duo leading Singuard's five divisions.