Importing products

Sliptree can import your product and service catalogue from a spreadsheet. CSV, XLSX and ODS files are accepted. A sample CSV shows the expected layout.

What goes in each column

Only one column is strictly required:

Name — what the product or service is called.

Everything else is optional, but worth including if you have it:

Description — longer text shown on the invoice line.
Unit — e.g. pcs, h, kg.
Price (net) — the price before tax.
Price (gross) — the price including tax.
ID — your own external identifier (SKU, part number). Used to recognise existing products on re-import.

Net price vs gross price

You only need one of the two price columns. Pick the one that matches how you think about your prices:

If you sell to businesses and price excluding VAT, use Price (net).
If you sell to consumers and your prices already include VAT, use Price (gross).

If you include both, Sliptree uses what's in each column as-is and doesn't reconcile them against your tax rate. Including only one is usually better — Sliptree calculates the other from your default tax rate when the product is used on an invoice.

Header names — we'll do our best to match them

Your spreadsheet's column headers almost certainly won't match Sliptree's field names exactly. That's fine — the import tries to recognise common variations:

Name matches name, title.
Price (net) matches amount, price, price_excluding_tax.
Price (gross) matches total, price_including_tax.
Other fields match their own English names.

You'll see the proposed mapping in the column mapping step. Anything Sliptree couldn't identify automatically is left as — Skip this column — and you can pick the right field from the dropdown. Columns you genuinely don't want to import can stay set to Skip.

Column mapping step in the product import dialog — source columns (id, external_id, name, description, net_price, gross_price, tax_id) auto-mapped to Sliptree fields

Updating existing products

On the mapping screen there's a checkbox: Update any products that already exist. When it's ticked, Sliptree looks for an existing product with the same ID (your external identifier) and updates it instead of creating a duplicate.

A few things to know:

Matching is by the ID column only. Matching by name is intentionally not supported — two products can legitimately share a name.
Empty columns in your file don't overwrite existing values. If a row in your file leaves Description blank but the product in Sliptree has one, the existing description is kept.
Leave the checkbox off (the default) when you only want to add new products. Any row whose ID already exists is skipped.

After the import

The import runs in the background. You'll get an email when it's finished, with a summary of how many products were created, updated and skipped.

If anything went wrong — bad numbers in a price column, a missing name, a duplicate ID — the email links to an error report spreadsheet that lists each problem row with the original data and the reason it failed. Fix the rows in your source file and re-import just those, or re-import the whole file with Update existing turned on.

See Exporting products if you ever need to pull your catalogue back out, and Importing customers for the equivalent flow on the customer side.