Importing Your Data From My Time

If you have been using the My Time app to care for your ministry records, you can bring everything into Field Service Companion in a few minutes. Your contacts, visit history, and more come across in one step — and it all happens on your device.

What Comes Across

• Contacts — names, addresses, phone numbers, and your notes.
• Visit history — every return visit, with its date, notes, and what you left. Your first conversation with each person becomes their initial call in Field Service Companion.
• Service time and report corrections — brought across and kept safe for a future update that will display them.
• Literature placements — including bulk placements.

Contacts you had deleted in My Time arrive in Recently Deleted, with a fresh 30-day window in case you want any of them back. (One exception: if a deleted contact had earlier been merged into one of your existing contacts, the combined record stays — the app never deletes anything you built on.)

Some things stay behind: territories, pictures, and My Time's own app settings. The import summary lists exactly what was left out, so nothing disappears silently.

Imported contacts never count toward the free contact limit. Your history is welcome here, all of it.

Before You Start

You need your My Time backup file. On your iPhone or iPad:

1. Open My Time and use its backup or export option.
2. Save the backup file somewhere you can reach it — the Files app, iCloud Drive, or email it to yourself.

The file usually ends in .mytimedb. If your backup arrived inside a compressed (zip) file, that is fine too — pick the zip file as it is, and the app looks inside it for your backup.

One thing to watch for: My Time can also share reports — a PDF or text summary of your activity. A report is not a backup and cannot be imported. If you are not sure which file you have, look for the one ending in .mytimedb (or the zip file that contains it).

How to Import

1. Tap the Settings tab.
2. Tap Import from another app.
3. Tap My Time, then choose your backup file.
4. Review the preview — it shows how many contacts, visits, and other records were found before anything is saved.
5. If any records look similar to contacts you already have, the app asks you about each one: Merge them, Keep both, or skip it for now. Records that are certainly the same person merge automatically — and every merge can be undone.
6. Tap Import.

If the App Cannot Read Your File

If you pick a file that is not a My Time backup, the app tells you why and helps you try again:

• "Not a backup file" usually means a shared report, PDF, or spreadsheet was picked. Go back to My Time, open Settings, and use its Backup option — then pick the file that ends in .mytimedb.
• "We looked inside that compressed file" means the zip you picked did not contain a backup. Export a fresh backup from My Time and try again.
• "That compressed file holds several backups" means the zip contains more than one backup — perhaps exports from two different months, or from a phone and a tablet, zipped together. The app will not guess which one you meant: unzip the file first, then pick the single backup you want to import.
• "Could not be opened" usually means the file has not finished downloading — open the Files app, tap the file once so it downloads to your device, then try again.

Tap Try again on the message to pick another file, or How to export your backup to reopen this article. Nothing is changed in your records until you reach the preview and tap Import.

If You Change Your Mind

The summary screen has an Undo import button. One tap removes what the import added and puts merged contacts back exactly as they were before. One nuance worth knowing: if you re-import a newer backup of the same store, fields it refreshed on previously imported contacts keep their refreshed values — Undo removes the new batch's additions but does not rewind those refreshes.

You can run the same import again later — the app recognizes records it has already imported and updates them instead of creating duplicates. Anything you have edited in this app since stays as you wrote it: your local edits always win over an older or undated backup.

Your Privacy

The import reads your backup file on your device only. Nothing in it is uploaded, and no one — including us — can see your records. To learn more, see Privacy and Your Data.