Products are the cornerstone for any operation and often the starting point as you begin your inventory management system implementation. Finale uses its Product ID field as the unique identifier for each product record, synonymous with SKU.
A product catalog is a comprehensive list of products, from raw materials to finished goods. It usually includes product ID (SKU), description of each product, product category, supplier information, pricing information, and any other specifications that you want to capture. A well-designed product catalog can be a powerful tool, allowing you the ability to centralize information and generate more-detailed reporting.
Please keep in mind that any product or item that you are tracking inventory on needs to be added to your Finale Inventory account.
Finale recommends that each user familiarizes themselves with the product detail screen, which details all the fields available for your products in your product catalog. This allows you the ability to step-back and decide how granular you want to be with your details. Users can also create custom fields for data elements that do not exist by default. Please see the product detail overview article for a more comprehensive resource on creating custom fields and detailing each available field.
Once you have defined your goals for your product catalog, it is time to import, or create, your products
There are three options to import or create your products:
- Marketplace Import (Integration)
- Spreadsheet Import
- Create Single Product
Please keep in mind that if you elect to import products from your marketplace through our integration option, then you will first need to connect your marketplace to Finale.
Most users take advantage of the spreadsheet import option since it allows you the ability to not only import your products in bulk, but also import more data fields or even custom fields, rather than being limited to defined fields, like in the marketplace import.
How-to Import Products From Marketplace
This option is great for users that already have a defined product catalog on their marketplace. Users can take advantage of Finale’s integration task, import products and stock levels, to bulk-import the following general product fields: title, price, image, UPC, and product lookup (varies by integration).
Your products must have SKUs listed and defined on your products on the marketplace for the import to work. The SKU will be imported as the product ID.
Please keep in mind that if you have alias SKUs, or different SKUs for the same product across different marketplaces, this could create duplicate products in your Finale account, especially if you are running this integration task on multiple integrations.
The solution is to import from the marketplace that has your desired SKU naming convention and use product lookups to map the other alias SKUs from your other marketplaces to that same, central product ID in Finale.
How-to Import Products Using A Spreadsheet
If you have all your information in a spreadsheet, this is the option for you. This is actually the most-used import method. Another key point about this bulk-entry method is that it allows the user to import any data point on the product detail page (product categories, supplier 1 lead days, etc), rather than being limited to the defined fields with the integration import method.
Please keep in mind that you can’t import suppliers or custom fields in the product import before those suppliers or custom fields are first added to Finale as options.
How-to Create Single Product
Unlike the first two options, this option is mostly used to create a product on the fly. This is not a bulk-entry method. This option is used to add or edit a single product.
For questions, feedback, or article ideas, email service@finaleinventory.com.
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