To upload vendor catalog and inventory simply click on “Vendor” on the left menu, and then click on the “Upload Catalog” button on the top of the page. Then select a CSV file and upload it. Read below for detail.

What is Vendor Catalog?

A vendor catalog is a list of products or services offered by a particular vendor or supplier. Vendor catalogs are the files (usually spreadsheets) that you receive from your suppliers outlining the item codes, descriptions of items, and prices for the items that they sell to you. In Datamoto, you can upload vendor catalog files. By uploading these files, you can automatically build your inventory and maintain the current purchasing price from the vendor. You can also link one inventory item to multiple vendors through their vendor catalogs.

What is Inventory?

Inventory is the database in that you keep all the items from all the vendors (including your own) that you sell to your customers. The inventory may contain information such as item code, description of the item, selling cost, discount, unit of measure, specification of the item, and other information.

When should I use “Uploading Catalog and Inventory”?

You should use this operation only if you buy items from suppliers to sell. In Datamoto when you create a purchase order (PO), the price for the item is automatically populated from the vendor catalog.

You can ask your vendor for an item catalog or you can create yourselves if there are only a few items that you buy. If you do not buy items from vendors then you can not use this operation.

This “Uploading” operation does the following:

  1. It adds catalog and inventory items if these items do not already exist.
  2. It updates catalog and inventory items if these items already exist.
  3. If a catalog item exists but the inventory item does not then it updates the existing catalog and adds a new item.
  4. If a catalog item does not exist but an inventory item already exists, then it adds the new catalog item and updates the existing inventory item.
  5. In all the above operations, it creates the link between inventory items and catalog items.

What type of file format is required to upload?

Datamoto only accepts CSV file formats. You can save an Excel file as a CSV file. To do it, open your Excel file, click on File, and then click on Save As. Then select the File Format as “Comma Separated Values (.csv)” or CSV (comma delimited).  Then save it. It creates a new file with a .csv extension. If you want to update the CSV file, just update the Excel file and do the same process as described above to save it as a CSV file.

What are the headers of the CSV file?

These are the valid headers of a CSV file:

vendor_id, vendorcode, description, vendor_price, selling_price, category, unit_of_measure, currency, inventory, discount, color, model, specification, country_of_origin, alert_threshold, reorder_qty,  intemcode, warehouse, barcode, assetaccount, weight, weight_mou, length, length_mou, height, height_mou, width, width_mou 

The headers in the RED color are a must-have. Other headers are optional. This means you must have data for these columns. For the rest of the columns data are optional, but the header column name must exist in the CSV file. THE HEADER COLUMN NAMES AND THEIR ORDER MUST BE MAINTAINED. You must download first the sample file to check the current format of the file.

Data in the CSV file

The vendor_id is very important data in the file. Before you can upload a catalog from a vendor, you must first create the vendor in Datamoto. You can do that by simply clicking on “Vendor” at the left menu and clicking “create new”. Once you have the vendor, you can click the existing vendor to find the vendor ID – which is usually displayed on the top of the page in Datamoto. You must use this vendor ID in the vendor_id column.

The vendor_id, vendorcode, and vendor_price are must have – you must provide data for them. For the rest, even if you do not provide any data, you can still upload the file.

The itemcode is optional in this file. The itemcode is the code of the item in your inventory. If you do not supply this information CSV file, then the upload operation will use the vendorcode as itemcode.

Download a sample Catalog and Inventory CSV file from the Vendor page.

Datamoto allows uploading inventory items and vendor items. Each row in the CSV file may contain two types of information: inventory item and vendor catalog item. A row may contain both inventory items and vendor catalog items or only inventory item information. Inventory item information is a must for each row. If a row has both the inventory item and vendor catalog item, then these two will be linked in the database. This means that the inventory item is supplied by the linked vendor.

unit_of_measure: This is optional. The following are the supported values:
cm for Centimeter
mm for Meter
km for Kilometer
oz for Ounce
lb for Pound
gm for Gram
kg for Kilogram
ton for Ton
pt for Pint
qt for Quarts
gl for Galon
lt for Liter
pcs for Pieces or Numbers
doz for Dozen
bbl for Barrel
cu for Cubic

*** The above values (such as cm, pcs, doz, etc.) must be entered in lowercase as shown above.

country_of_origin: This is the country of origin i.e., where actually this item is produced. This is a two letters country code. This is optional. The value must be two letters code such as the US for the United States of America to indicate your client’s country of origin. The complete list for all countries can be found at: http://www.iso.org/iso/country_names_and_code_elements

currency: This is the currency for the vendor item. This is optional. If no currency is entered, then the system will put “USD” as the default value. If you need a different currency, then you must enter a 3 digits currency value. You can find all 3 digits of currency here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_4217

Uploading Inventory Count for Each Warehouse

You can also upload the stock level of each item for each location. To do that, simply download the current catalog of a vendor from the Vendor page. Make sure you have warehouse locations already defined. For example, you already have two locations: “WH_London” and “WH_NewYork”. Now, you can append two headers in the CSV file:  location:WH_London and location:WH_NewYork. The “location:” prefix for the header names is required. If you have stock for an item for a location then update it in the specific cell of the CSV file. When you update this CSV file, your warehouse stock will be updated appropriately.