Bring your whole stock list over at once

Adding items one at a time

Setting up inventory meant adding items one card at a time. A cafe with two hundred things on the shelf was looking at an afternoon of typing, and the people who told us about it had already stopped partway through. One of them had been running a handbook for two weeks with nothing in it.

There was an importer, but it only existed inside the setup wizard, and skipping that step once meant never finding it again. The Items page never mentioned it.

How bulk add works

Bulk add sits next to New item. Drop in a spreadsheet, a text file, or a list you typed yourself, say anything it should know, and it proposes the items for you to approve.

• The assistant reads your column headers and about fifteen rows, tells you what it thinks each column means, and asks about anything genuinely unclear.
• Handbook then reads every row itself. A 500-row export takes the same single reply as a 100-row one.
• Pack sizes are worked out and checked against the file's own per-unit price, so a column reading "2 x bag" becomes one case holding two bags.
• Everything arrives as one approval, and everything is undoable.

The first version lost rows

The first version worked and we shipped it. Then we measured it on a 300-row file and found it was retyping your rows rather than transforming them: 48 round trips, about twenty-five minutes, and by the second half it had begun repeating item names it had already written. Because items match by name, each repeat quietly overwrote an earlier one. Three hundred rows arrived as 166 items and nothing said so.

We rebuilt it four days later. The same file now arrives as 300 items in about ten seconds. We would rather tell you that than let you find it.