*** IMPORTANT *** This step must be completed BEFORE you can import stock levels.
You CANNOT import quantities or stock levels in THIS step.
Overview
The product list is a list of rows defining the products in your inventory. Each product is defined by a product ID that identifies the product, and a collection of properties that specify what it is. For example, the description, item price, category, and color are all properties of a product. There are about 30 pre-defined product properties. You may add your own custom fields(properties) by going to Application Settings>Products Tab and scrolling down to the Custom Fields section.
The stock quantity and location of storage are not product properties because they aren't part of the definition of what the product is; they pertain to counting how many you have, and where they are kept. Properties such as these are stock properties, rather than product properties.
NOTE: Stock Levels or your beginning quantities of inventory are imported AFTER your create your Product IDs, with a separate import process! See step 10. of the Quick Start Guide - Establish your Stock Levels.
The Import or update product list function deals only with the product list. When getting started this is usually the first import operation you do, because you need to define the products before specifying how many you have. A separate operation, Import stock take, is what you use to specify your stock levels based on a physical inventory count, but that comes later in step 10. of the Quick Start Guide 10. Establish your Stock Levels . To get started with your on-boarding to Finale Inventory, FIRST you need to define your products.
VERY IMPORTANT - If you are planning to use our QuickBooks Integration, see detailed notes below on Configuring Finale Inventory to work with QuickBooks
- Product Ids must be unique. The Product ID field has a limit of 191 characters. We highly recommend, if possible, to not use spaces and punctuation other than hyphens and underscores in your product ids. We do support spaces and punctuation, but they introduce more risk interoperability issues with any other software they are using.
- We highly recommend using all UPPER CASE. It is not required, however if you are using barcodes, the scan keys are case sensitive and the default settings on our barcode scanner will convert all scans to Upper case. This can be turned off in the scanner settings.
VERY IMPORTANT - If you just created new custom fields, Pricing, or Categories from the previous Quick Start steps, make sure you REFRESH your browser on the Import & Export screen, pictured below with all the import buttons, BEFORE you attempt to copy/paste your data for import. This is so the import routine will be aware of all of your new fields and changes.
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Setup Reorder Quantities for required stock levels and auto reorder points. This is done from the Product ID Details screen in the Purchasing Section. Make sure that the option is turned on from the Application Settings>Product Tab, Buying prices & reordering section:
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Working with QuickBooks - Export your products from QuickBooks then Import them into Finale Inventory. When integrating Finale Inventory with QuickBooks, Finale Inventory’s Product ID is what must have an EXACT match in your QuickBooks Inventory Items, Item Name. Finale Inventory’s Product ID connects to QuickBooks Inventory Items. Product Ids in Finale will not connect to Service Items or Assembly Items in QuickBooks. If you already have Inventory Items in your QuickBooks file, they must be 191 characters or less. IF your existing Inventory Item Names in your QuickBooks file are longer than 191 characters, Finale Inventory will not be able to integrate with them, and Finale Inventory will create new Inventory Items in QuickBooks to match the ones in Finale. You can edit your Item name in QuickBooks, prior to syncing with Finale Inventory, and Finale will be able to sync with them.
Import or Update
You can import or update your product list by cutting and pasting from Excel. Each column in the Excel table defines a property; each row is a product. If a product row already exists in the product list, then the import or update operation updates that product; if the product doesn't yet exist, it will be created.
The only required property is the product ID, which identifies the products. All other properties are optional. You can selectively update specific properties of your products by doing the import or update operation with only the property columns you want to update, and of course the product ID column to identify the products.
The first row in the Excel table specifies the names of the columns, which can be in any order. The names have to be exact matches to the supported column names listed later on this page below. A simple example might be an Excel table that adds or updates product names of only two products. Below is a simple example of 5 rows to import 5 products into the database:
Product ID Description Category Color TEST-001 Blue T-Shirt Shirts Blue TEST-002 Red T-Shirt SHIRTS Red TEST-003 White T-Shirt T-SHIRTS White TEST-003 Long Sleeve Dress Shirt Red TEST-005 Short Sleeve Dress Shirts Yellow
Preview
When you paste from Excel into the import window, Finale shows you a summary of the number of rows being imported as new products and the number of existing products being updated. It also summarizes any errors, such as multiple rows with the same product IDs. Can you see the error in this example preview?
This simple import consisted of just five rows, but two of the rows had the same product ID. Multiple rows with the same product ID don't make any sense, because a product can have only one definition. The preview window shows you that the forth row is ignored because it has the same product ID as the third row. The preview also shows in the summary that you are importing three newly created products, and updating one existing products.
The column drop-downs for columns #1, #2, #3, and #4, allow you to pick the meaning of each column if your column names didn't match the list of supported column names. In the example above, the first three column names matched, so the drop-downs were automatically filled in to match the column names just below them. Notice that column #4 says --Unassigned--. The imported column value of Color did not match any of the columns at this moment. If you had a misspelling in a column name, then you could either hit the browser's back button, fix the misspelling, and paste again, or you could just change the drop-down, and pick the field that matches what you wanted. In this example, Color does not exist so you would need to go to the Application Settings>Products Tab and add the new custom field called Color. After adding a Custom Field you need to refresh your browser so the importing routine will know about your new field.
Completing the Operation
After the preview step, Finale presents you with a dialog to continue with the operation. The preview step itself makes no actual changes, so you can use the browser's back button and forward button to flip back and forth and to re-paste information. Only after you confirm the import will any changes be made.
Importing large product lists, of say more than 10,000 items, is faster to do in sections. If your Excel product list is 50,000 lines long, the quickest way to import it is to divide it into five sections of 10,000 items and import each of the 10,000 items.
Sample product import template.
A sample product import file can be downloaded here.
How-to Video
Supported Column Names
Below the Copy/Paste import window will be a list of supported column names. This list will change and will be automatically expanded/contracted when you created custom fields or add pricing fields, or when you turn on and off features.
Product ID
The product ID is the unique database key identifying the product. It is the only field that cannot be changed once set. The field can contain ASCII characters not including whitespace, up to 191 characters total. Three common schemes for product IDs are: (1) simply number them starting at 10000 and counting up; (2) encode additional information in the product ID to identify what it is, such as the caliber, manufacturer, effect type, and maybe year, e.g., 2CK-LID1001; (3) just use the manufacturer's product ID as your own.
Description
The description is the name of the product, up to 256 characters. Non-ASCII Unicode characters are supported, so the name can be in a non-English language, including Asian languages like Chinese or Japanese. The description is also the recipe by which Finale choreography tools construct a default simulation for the product. Since Finale incorporates language parsing technology to interpret and understand the description, the default simulations are usually a reasonable match if the description is in fact descriptive. If the description is a proper name, such as for a consumer cake, then you will need to add a custom simulation rather than relying on the default. The Finale choreography documentation provides further details on simulations.
Category
The category must be an exact match to one of the product categories set in "Application Settings > Product". The matching is case-sensitive and whitespace sensitive.
Notes
Notes are a description of the product, up to 256 characters Unicode.
Std accounting cost
Std accounting cost is the cost per each item, written as an integer or floating point number with a period decimal point, no dollar sign or other currency symbol, e.g., "1.2" not "$1.2". Although you may have acquired stock at varying costs from different purchases, this std accounting cost property of the product is a single number that is considered to apply to all stock of this particular product. Therefore if you change the std accounting cost of a product, that change applies to all your stock of that product.
Item price
Similar to std accounting cost, the item price is the price per each item, written as an integer or floating point number with a period decimal point, no dollar sign or other currency symbol, e.g., "1.2" not "$1.2". The actual price at which you sell stock may vary from sale to sale depending on discounts that you may offer, but the base level price used in the calculation to determine the actual selling price is this item price for individual items or the case price (see below) for stock sold in cases.
Case price
Similar to item price, the case price is the price for stock sold in cases (if you are keeping track of cases separately from open stock), written as an integer or floating point number with a period decimal point, no dollar sign or other currency symbol, e.g., "1.2" not "$1.2". The actual price at which you sell stock may vary from sale to sale depending on discounts that you may offer, but the base level price used in the calculation to determine the actual selling price is the item price and case price.
Std packing
The standard packing is string of the form "36/1" or "12/12/1" or "12/12" or just "72", defining the default packing for cases of this product. The first number in the string identifies the number of items in the case. Since it is possible to keep stock in cases with different packings simultaneously, the actual packing of case stock must be a property of the stock itself rather than a property of a product. That is why this field is called the "standard packing" or "default packing" rather than the actual "packing." The relationship between the standard packing and the actual packing is this: if you specify a case quantity in a order or stock operation but do not specify the specific packing of that case quantity, then the standard packing is filled in by default. The purpose of the standard packing is to make it so you don't have to type in a specific packing all the time, and yet to allow you to type in a specific packing when you need to.
When the standard packing is filled in by default, the result is identical to the result of typing in that same packing string by hand. This result then becomes a property of the stock involved in that order or stock operation, decoupled from the standard packing property of the product. Thus if you later change the standard packing, that change will have no effect on existing stock or transactions.
Std bin ID
The standard bin ID identifies the standard bin or box or bay in which a product is stored inside a magazine. If the facility or street address is the location, and the magazine or shed is a sub-location, then the bin is a sub-sub-location. In Finale Inventory, storage location records are kept for the location and sub-location, but not for the sub-sub-location. If you move an item from one magazine to another, a record of that transaction is kept (and required for the DSMT report!). However if you move an item from one bin to another, or if you change the name of a bin, that level of detail is not tracked in Finale Inventory. Thus the standard bin is just a property of the product that is maintained as a useful piece of information for warehouse personnel to indicate the usual whereabouts of the stock for picking.
Status
If you want to deactivate or activate a batch of products, you can import a spreadsheet with just two columns: Product ID an Status. The status fields in the rows should contain the word "Inactive" or "Active".
Manufacturer
The manufacturer field is simply the name of the manufacturer, a Unicode string up to 20 characters long. Since transactions in the DSMT reports are grouped by product category and manufacturer, it is important that your manufacturer field values do not have typographical errors. The items in each group must match exactly. Items with the manufacturer "LIDU" will not match "LDU".
Mfg product ID
The manufacturer product ID is the product ID assigned by the manufacturer. The field can contain ASCII characters not including whitespace, up to 20 characters total. If you are using Finale choreography tools, the manufacturer product ID, if set, will identify the manufacturer provided simulation for that product type if it exists, which would be used as the default simulation for the product instead of a simulation constructed based on the description.
Mfg country
The manufacturer country is the country code, e.g. CHN or USA. It must be an exact match to the international standard country codes.
Weight per item
Like Std accounting cost, the weight per item is the weight of each item, written as an integer or floating point number with a period decimal point, no unit of measure, e.g., "0.025" not "0.025kg". The unit of measure is specified separately as the weight unit (see below).
NEQ per item
Like weight per item, the NEQ is the net explosive quantity of each item, written as an integer or floating point number with a period decimal point, no unit of measure, e.g., "0.025" not "0.025kg". The unit of measure is specified separately as the weight unit (see below).
Weight unit
The weight unit is the weight unit of measure, either "kg" or "lb". If weight per it or NEQ per item is supplied but weight unit is left blank, then it is set to "lb" by default. The field is imported case insensitive. The accepted values for import are kilogram, kilograms, kg, pound, pounds, lb, and lbs.
Custom Fields or Pricing Fields you create or add
As you add new custom fields or pricing fields, they will automatically appear in available to be imported list of fields.
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