07. Import & Create your Product IDs

**IMPORTANT ** Products must be created before stock levels can be created/imported. 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 following the steps outlined in step 6 of the Quick Start Guide: Create your Custom Fields.

The stock quantity and storage location are not product properties because they do not define what the product is. Properties such as these are stock properties, rather than product properties.

The Import or update product list function deals only with the product list. When getting started, this is usually the first major bulk import operation you do because of the 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. This process is addressed in step 11 of the Quick Start Guide: Establish your Stock Levels.

Note - If you are planning to use our QuickBooks integration, please see the detailed notes below on how to configure Finale Inventory to work with QuickBooks

• Product Ids must be unique. The Product ID field has a limit of 191 characters and can support accented characters from European languages or Chinese/Japanese/Korean/Cyrillic.
• Spaces and most punctuation are not recommended to be used in your product IDs (other than hyphens and underscores). While finale does support spaces and punctuation, they typically introduce more risk and interoperability issues with other software or selling channel integrations.
• UPPERCASE is highly recommended. Although not required, if you are using barcodes, the scan keys are case sensitive and the default settings on our barcode scanner will convert all scans to Uppercase. This however can be turned off in the scanner settings.

Creating your products

Products can be created individually or in bulk. Bulk options include importing from a spreadsheet or importing from an integration. For more information on how to create products using an integration, refer to the following help article: How do I import products or stock from an integration?

Creating products individually

Navigate to your Products page and click "Create product". From here, you will have the option to create a product with a custom product ID or allow Finale to use a system generated ID. All that is required to create a product in Finale is a product ID.

Creating products in bulk via import

Note - If you just created new custom fields, Pricing, or Categories from the previous Quick Start steps, make sure you REFRESH your browser before importing your actual products. This allows the import function to be made aware of all of your new fields and changes.

You can access the import screen by going to the Inventory > Products screen or through the Import drop-down menu in the global header and selecting "Import Products".

You can import or update your product list by cutting and pasting from a spreadsheet. Each column in the spreadsheet defines a property; each row is a product.

• If a product in the product list already exists in Finale, then the import operation updates that product
• If the product does not 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.

A header row in the spreadsheet is required for import. This header row should define the columns, which can be in any order.

Note - Column names in your spreadsheet do not have to be exact matches for the supported column names. Finale will automatically map the columns if they are exact matches, but our import tool allows you to assign columns as needed in order to match the data with the desired field.*

*Related help article - Import Products - Supported Column Titles

An example of an import:

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 the spreadsheet into the import window, Finale shows you a summary of the number of rows being imported as new products, as well as the number of existing products being updated. It also summarizes any errors, such as multiple rows with the same product IDs.

The drop-down menus above each column allows you to pick the desired field for each column if your column names did not match the list of supported column names. This is demonstrated in column #4 above. 

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 and more reliable to do in smaller sections. If your Excel product list has 50,000 products, the quickest way to import it is to divide it into five sheets with 10,000 products on each and import them one at a time.

Looking for a sample template? You can download one here.

Working with QuickBooks

• When integrating Finale Inventory with QuickBooks, The product ID in Finale must be an exact match for the item name in QuickBooks (QuickBooks Inventory Items, Item Name).
• The product ID connects to QuickBooks Inventory Items only. They will not connect to Service Items or Assembly Items.
• If you already have Inventory Items in your QuickBooks file, they must be 191 characters or less. If they are longer than 191 characters, Finale Inventory will not be able to integrate with them, and Finale will instead 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 properly sync with them
• To import your products from QuickBooks, you must first export your products from QuickBooks then import them into Finale Inventory

Video Tutorial

Next Step: 8. Create your Kits & Bundles