Revisions are imported into a running Perforce Server. The Perforce Server could be new or contain existing data, but it must be running. Subversion revisions are added sequentially; file content is 'imported' and metadata such as file attributes, descriptions, dates and usernames are added to the Perforce changelist. CVS data is sorted into changeslists, based on available metadata such as date/time, author, change descriptions and file actions.

The recommended use of Import Mode is to start a new Perforce server to import each set of changes into a Perforce changelist. Using this method will produce a one-to-one mapping of Subversion revision numbers to Perforce changelists and a reproducible set of CVS changes. The new Perforce server can be used in isolation to confirm the success of the migration and then merged with an existing Perforce Server using the PerfMerge++ tool.