Import articles from Excel

What is it?

Import brings an existing article range into KASSIO in one pass — from Excel, from a CSV file, or from the export of the system you used before. A five-step wizard walks you through checking and transferring the data.

Nothing is written to your shop until you confirm in the last step. When you do, the import writes everything or nothing: a failure halfway through never leaves you with half a catalogue.

What is it for?

• Move your whole article range over on the day you start.
• Take a supplier's price list and turn it into articles.
• Update many articles at once instead of opening each one.

Two ways in

With our template (recommended)

Download the template on the first step, in your language. Delete the two example rows, enter your own articles, upload the file. The wizard recognises its own template and skips the column-mapping step entirely.

The template is available as Excel (.xlsx) and as CSV, in German and Russian — pick the language next to the download buttons, whatever language the system itself runs in.

In the Excel version every column heading carries a note: whether the column is required and what belongs in it. Excel marks such a cell with a small triangle in the corner; the note appears on hover.

Left in place, the example rows are created as real articles. That is deliberate — a template whose own examples the importer rejected would be teaching a format it does not accept. The Check step therefore points them out and offers to drop them in one click.

Recognition goes by the column headings, not by their order. You may move columns and translate individual headings — a German template with Russian headings is still the template. What counts is the set: exactly these columns, each one once. One column too many, or one twice, and the file goes through the normal mapping step.

In the Excel version the article-number and barcode columns are formatted as text, so a code with leading zeros keeps them.

With your own file

Any Excel file (.xlsx, .xlsm, .xls) or CSV up to 25 MB. This is the path for an export out of your previous system. The importer copes with the things such exports usually carry:

• A company name, a logo row or an export date above the real header row — the header

is found, not assumed to be row 1.

• Several sheets. Sheets with identical columns are joined; sheets with different columns

are reported and left out.

• CSV with a semicolon, a comma, a tab or a pipe as separator, in UTF-8 or in

Windows/CP1251 encoding. The separator is worked out from the file, and a junk row above the header does not confuse it.

The five steps

1. File

Choose the file. You are told which header row was found, how many data rows there are, which sheets were joined, and which were skipped.

If you left an import unfinished — closed the window, lost power — the wizard offers to pick up where you were. Your work is saved continuously on the device.

2. Columns

Each column of your file gets a target field.

• Green means the column heading and the values agree. It is almost certainly right.
• Yellow means only one of the two matched. Look at it.

Name and selling price are mandatory. Everything else is optional — including the article number: leave it out and the system hands one out (see Article numbers below).

The important control here is the number format. A price written 1.234,56 and read as 1.234 turns a 1234.56 article into a 1.23 one, and the import would report success. So the wizard shows you what your cells become:

"1.234,56"  ->  1234.56

If that line is right, your prices are right. If it is not, switch the format above it.

A cell that disagrees with the chosen format is rejected, not reinterpreted. If the column reads as dot-decimal and one cell says 14,50, that row becomes an error saying what it would have been read as. Silently turning it into 1450 is the one thing this wizard must never do.

3. Values

Tax rates and product groups out of your file are connected to the ones in KASSIO.

• Product groups that do not exist yet are created — or you map them onto an existing

group, or leave the article without one.

• A tax value you do not map makes the row an error. It never silently becomes 0 %.

You also choose here which warehouse the stock is booked into.

4. Check

Every row gets a status.

• Error rows are never written.
• Warning rows are written — a missing barcode is cosmetic, a missing tax class is not.

You can correct cells directly in the table. The last column, Read as, shows the selling price the importer took from each row. That is the number that will be written — check it, especially after you edit a cell. A price of 1450 where you typed 14,50 is visible there and nowhere else.

A negative selling price, a negative purchase price and a negative stock figure are errors. Zero is allowed for all three.

The Action column says what each row will do: create, update, skip or error, with the totals above the table. Clicking the action takes a row out of the import, or puts it back.

An article whose name is already in the catalogue gets a warning naming the article number that holds it. It is not rejected: two articles legitimately share a name often enough — the same milk from two suppliers. Articles in the trash do not count.

If some article numbers already exist, you decide: skip them, or overwrite them. Before an overwrite you are shown how many articles are affected, how many prices change, and which price changes the most.

Overwriting writes the cells you filled in. An empty cell changes nothing: a price list re-imported to update prices carries no descriptions and no barcodes, and reading its blanks as deletions would strip your catalogue.

5. Result

Counts of what was created, updated, skipped and rejected, plus any warnings.

Article numbers

You do not have to invent article numbers. Leave the column out, or leave individual cells empty, and the system issues them in sequence — ART-00001, ART-00002 — from the same series the manual product form uses.

One thing comes with that: the article number is also the key a later import uses to tell whether an article already exists. A file without its own numbers cannot recognise itself, so importing it a second time creates the articles again. The result screen names the numbers that were issued; copy them into your file if you intend to import it once more.

Stock and prices

Stock is booked only for newly created articles, and it is booked as a real goods receipt using the purchase price from the file. That is why stock valuation and history stay correct — the import does not write a quantity into a column behind the system's back.

For articles that already exist, no stock is booked. A second import of the same file would otherwise double your stock. Corrections belong in the stock count.

If a purchase price is missing, stock is booked at value 0 and valuation for that article starts with your next goods receipt. The wizard says so — whether the whole column is missing or only some cells are empty.

Column reference

The columns of the canonical template, in order.

Your own file does not have to use these headings — the wizard recognises many common spellings in German, English and Russian, and anything it cannot place you assign by hand in step 2.

Good to know

• A barcode that already belongs to a different article or to a variant is rejected.

Letting it through would mean scanning that code at the till rings up the wrong item.

• An article number that appears twice inside your own file marks both rows as errors.

Only you can decide which one is real.

• The mapping you confirm is remembered for files with the same column headings. The next

export out of the same old system needs no manual work.