How to import purchase orders and supplier confirmations

Three imports, for three different jobs: bringing an existing order book in, turning a supplier's confirmation into a new order, and adding confirmed lines to an order you already have. All of them preview before they write.

Before you start

Import controls appear for people with write access.

Importing writes into Tideswell only. Your original spreadsheet is untouched, and nothing is sent to Shopify or to a supplier.

How do you import your existing order book?

Import CSV, on the calendar view. Paste or upload the file, and you get a preview of what will be created or updated, with per-row errors listed.

The file needs a specific header row:

vendor, po_number, revise_by_date, ship_date, days_out, original_amount, revised_amount, status

The preview shows the first ten rows and lists the first twenty errors, which is enough to tell whether the file is right without scrolling a thousand lines. Fix the file and re-import rather than fixing rows afterwards.

This is the one to use when you are moving off a spreadsheet. Do it once, check the book looks right, then work in Tideswell.

How do you turn a supplier's confirmation into an order?

Import confirmation, also on the calendar view. Upload the file the supplier sent and map its columns.

Mapping means telling Tideswell which column is the product, the quantity, the SKU and the unit cost. Product and quantity are required, and SKU and unit cost are optional.

The mapping is remembered per vendor, so the second time you import from Portside Mills the form is already filled in. That is the part that makes this worth using every month rather than once.

How do you add confirmed lines to an order you already have?

Import lines, from the order's own page. Same mapping, applied to the existing order.

This is the usual monthly rhythm: you wrote the order, the supplier came back with what they can actually supply, and this puts their numbers in as revised quantities.

A line already on the order is skipped rather than duplicated.

What does the summary tell you?

Before committing: how many rows are ready and how many will be skipped.

Afterwards: how many lines were imported, how many were matched to Shopify, and how many were skipped.

Matched to Shopify means the line's SKU was found in your catalogue, so on-hand and incoming figures can be shown for it. An unmatched line still imports; it just cannot show those columns.

What if a lot of lines did not match Shopify?

You are told to open the order and re-run the import to match them, which is the fix.

Unmatched lines are usually a SKU written differently by the supplier, or a product not in Shopify yet. Both are worth correcting, because an unmatched line cannot contribute to incoming stock and will not appear in reorder maths. See How to find out what you need to reorder.

Why did rows get skipped?

Most often because the line is already on this order, which is the safe outcome: importing the same confirmation twice does not double an order.

Otherwise the preview's per-row errors name the reason before you commit. Reading that preview is the whole point of it.

Why is the import taking a while?

Because matching SKUs against your Shopify catalogue is the slow part, and a large file does a lot of it. It runs under a longer time limit for exactly that reason.

Let it finish rather than re-running it.