Importing your data

User guide · Article 2 of 10

Customers, vendors, stock with its cost, and open orders, from a spreadsheet, with a dry run before anything is written.

Where the importer is

Each import lives on the page that holds the records it creates. On Items, Vendors and Customers, open New and take Import from file at the top of the dialog: adding one record and adding a spreadsheet of them are the same door. Devices, Purchase Orders and Sales Orders keep an Import button in the toolbar. Each one keeps its own history of what was brought in.

What	Where	What each row is	Cost arrives as
Customers	Customers, New, Import from file	one customer with contact details and addresses	not applicable
Vendors	Vendors, New, Import from file	one supplier	not applicable
Serialized stock	Devices, Import	one unit: model, storage, colour, IMEI or serial, grade, condition, bin, cost	a cost layer on the unit
Bulk stock	Items, New, Import from file	one product with a quantity on hand	a cost layer for that quantity, at that cost
Open purchase orders	Purchase Orders, Import	one line of an order not yet received	the line's unit cost
Open sales orders	Sales Orders, Import	one line of an order not yet shipped	not applicable

Open purchase orders and open sales orders are one file, told apart by its type column, so the same page opens from either order list.

One kind per run, as a CSV or a spreadsheet.

Cost arrives as a layer, not a flat number overwritten onto the product. That is what lets the ledger report what the stock you hold actually cost, and what a later sale actually earned, rather than an average that forgets its history.

The four steps

Template. Download the template for the kind you are importing. The column names are the contract; the order does not matter and extra columns are ignored.
Validate. Upload the file. Every row is checked against your lists (a condition that does not exist, a warehouse that is not yours, an IMEI that is already in the workspace) and every problem is shown beside its row with the reason. Nothing is written yet.
Dry run. The wizard shows exactly what would be created, matched or skipped, with counts. A row that matches an existing record (a customer by email, a product by SKU) updates it rather than duplicating it, and the dry run says which.
Commit. The rows are written in one batch, and the batch is recorded with who ran it, when, and what changed. A batch can be reviewed afterwards from the History tab on the same page, which lists that kind's imports only.

Size and speed

A file up to the stated limit on the upload step is processed in one run; a larger history is split by date or by kind. A few thousand units takes a minute or two; the page stays open and reports as it goes.

What is not imported

Photos. Images are attached after the import: per unit from the record, or in bulk through the photo tools under Inventory.
Sold history older than the workspace's import floor. A workspace created on a date never imports a sale dated before it, so a channel's own history cannot arrive twice as revenue.
Listings. Marketplace listings come from the channel connection, not from a file.

After the import

Open Inventory and Products and spot-check a handful of records against the source. The analytics Inventory tab shows the on-hand count and the cost basis the import produced; if the total does not match what you expected, the batch record shows which rows were skipped and why.