CSV upload won't parse

Verify the file has a header row, a recognisable date column, and UTF-8 encoding. See CSV format requirements for full spec.

What's happening

The CSV upload connector expects a standard comma-separated file with a header row and at least one date column. If parsing fails, the most common causes are: a header row that's empty (or only contains numbers), a non-comma delimiter (semicolon or tab), file encoding that isn't UTF-8 (Excel sometimes saves as Windows-1252), or fully-numeric content where every cell looks like a date or a number depending on which row you read.

How to fix it

1. Open the CSV in a plain text editor (VS Code, BBEdit, Notepad++). The first line should be your column headers — words separated by commas, e.g. date,leads,spend,ctr.
2. Check the second line is a data row, not blank, and uses the same number of commas as the header. Inconsistent column counts trip the parser.
3. If Excel saved your file: re-export as CSV UTF-8 (Comma delimited) (*.csv), not the default CSV (Comma delimited). The UTF-8 variant doesn't introduce non-standard characters.
4. If your file uses semicolons or tabs as delimiters (common in European Excel): re-save with comma delimiters. Future versions of AgencyLens will auto-detect delimiters; v1 is comma-only.
5. Verify your date column header is something we recognise: date, day, Date, day_of, etc. We auto-detect date columns from their values, but a clearly-named header speeds things up.
6. Upload the cleaned file. AgencyLens will show inferred column types — you can override any of them in the configurator before building the report.

If you have currency or percent columns, format them as $1,234 or 2.5% rather than raw numbers — the parser uses these signals to set the column type. Raw numbers default to plain number type.

When to email support

If your CSV is comma-separated, UTF-8, has a header row, and parsing still fails — send a sample (with sensitive client values redacted) to support@agencylens.app along with the error message AgencyLens displayed.