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The Data Import wizard lets an administrator load your in bulk from spreadsheet (CSV) files, so a new workspace is ready in hours instead of being entered by hand. It validates every row before saving, never overwrites data you’ve already entered, and tells you exactly which rows to fix when something’s wrong. You’ll find it as Data Import in the Settings & Config sidebar group. It’s available to administrators. For the on-screen reference — what each catalog holds, the bilingual name fields, and how the catalogs feed BOMs, cost sheets, and purchase orders — see Master catalogs.

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What you can import

The wizard handles five kinds of master data. A separate importer on the same page loads a customer’s brand colour palette; the workspace’s shared colour list is not imported through this wizard (it is edited from Masters → Colours).

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Import in dependency order

Some records refer to others. The wizard shows a Recommended setup order notice for this reason:
  1. Customers, vendors, and units first. These stand on their own; a or can name a vendor that must already exist.
  2. Fabric and accessory masters second. They reference vendors, categories, and units.
  3. Material colours after masters. Each fabric or accessory master holds its own colours, added from the master’s own page.
  4. The customer brand palette any time. The separate importer at the bottom of the page loads a customer’s brand colours (customer name, colour code, name, Pantone).
Categories and units named on a master row are an exception — see minted on reference below.

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Preparing your data

For each entity, download the template from the wizard. The template is a CSV with the correct column headers and a couple of sample rows. Fill in your data under those headers — keep the header row exactly as provided.

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The match key

Every entity has a match key — the column the wizard uses to tell whether a row is a new record or one that already exists: For fabric and accessory masters the match is normalized: hyphens, spacing, and letter case are ignored, so RI-026A and RI026A are treated as the same item. Everyone else matches on the plain name or code, ignoring case and surrounding spaces.

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Columns by entity

The tables below list each column and whether it’s required. Anything not marked required is optional. Customers — match key name: Vendors / Factories — match key name: Fabric masters — match key article_no: Accessory masters — match key item_code: Units of measure — match key code:

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A note on file encoding

Save your file as CSV. UTF-8 is recommended, but files saved from a Chinese-locale copy of Excel (Big5 or GBK) are also accepted — the wizard detects the encoding for you, so Chinese names import correctly either way.

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Two import modes

The wizard offers two modes. Choose the one that matches what you’re doing:
  • Create only — a row that matches an existing record is reported as an error. Use this for initial onboarding, when the workspace is empty and every row should be new.
  • Fill blanks — for rows that match an existing record, only the empty fields are filled in; a field that already has a value is never overwritten. Use this to enrich existing records — for example, adding lead times or vendors to masters you imported earlier.
There is no mode that overwrites populated data, by design.

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Running the import

  1. Open Data Import from the Settings & Config sidebar group.
  2. Pick the entity you’re importing from the “What are you importing?” dropdown.
  3. Download the template and fill it in with your data.
  4. Choose the mode — Create only or Fill blanks.
  5. Upload your completed file.
  6. Preview — the wizard parses and validates every row without saving anything yet (see below).
  7. Fix any errors and re-upload until the preview is clean.
  8. Commit import. The wizard writes the data and shows a summary of how many records were created, enriched, and added by reference.

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Reading the preview

The preview validates your whole file before anything is saved. Above the row table you see the total rows, how many will be created, how many will be enriched, and the error count. Each row shows its number, its status (Create, Enrich, or Error), and the message — which column and what is wrong. The import is all-or-nothing: if even one row has an error, nothing is saved. Fix the flagged rows in your file and upload it again. This means you never end up with a half-imported file to untangle.

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Minted on reference

On a master row, the vendor, category, and unit columns refer to other records by name or code:
  • A vendor must already exist — that’s why you import vendors before masters. A master naming an unknown vendor is reported as an error.
  • A category or unit is created automatically if it doesn’t exist yet — this is “minting on reference”. A unit created this way is identical to one you’d import through the units template, so you don’t have to pre-create every category and unit by hand. The result summary reports how many categories and units were minted.

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Customer colour palette (separate importer)

At the bottom of the same Data Import page, a Customer colour palette card holds a separate importer for a customer’s brand colours — customer, colour code, colour name (English and Chinese), and Pantone. Same all-or-nothing preview-then-commit shape as the entity wizard above, with its own template. The customer palette is customer-scoped: a colour imported here belongs to one customer’s brand palette and is picked from that customer’s records downstream. Material colours (colours owned by a fabric or accessory master) are added from the master’s own page, not through either importer here. If your workspace does not show this card, your administrator has left the capability off; there is a toggle for it on Feature settings.

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After the import

  • Verify the counts. The result summary tells you how many records were created and enriched — check it against what you expected from your file.
  • Spot-check a few records in the relevant module to confirm the data landed where you expected.
  • Continue in order. If you’re onboarding from scratch, run customers, vendors, and units, then the fabric and accessory masters — so each step’s references are already in place.