Tutorial
Import a supplier file end to end
From upload to usable cost data, including the preflight checks worth making and why a held row is the system working.
About 9 minutes. Last reviewed against the product on .
This walks one supplier file from download to usable cost data, and spends most of its time on the part people skip: the rows the importer would not guess at.
1. Upload
Open Imports and upload the file. CSV, TSV, XLSX and text PDFs are all accepted. Nothing is written yet: the importer reads the file and shows you what it found.
2. Read the preflight before you accept it
You are checking three things, in this order:
- Did it find the right header row? Supplier exports often carry two or three lines of letterhead above the real headers.
- Are the units what you expect? This is where a file goes wrong silently.
- Is the row count roughly right? A file that parsed to nine rows when the invoice has ninety usually means a delimiter was misread.
3. Clear the queue
Anything the importer could not confidently map waits rather than being written.
- Confident rows
- Written
- with their source file recorded
- Unsure rows
- Held
- never guessed, never silently dropped
Measured from the import surface at /app/data-imports.
Resolving an item once is remembered against that supplier, so the queue shrinks with every file rather than repeating.
4. Check one line against the paper
Pick a single item and compare it to the invoice by eye. If the unit, pack size and price all match, the mapping is right and the rest of the file follows the same rules.
Next: cost a recipe, or compare two suppliers properly.