How to export a price file as CSV

Sooner or later, a merchant needs a copy of the catalogue and prices outside the merchant system. It might be for a price review, a new quoting tool, a pilot, or simply a check on what the system really holds. The export itself is usually a few clicks. Getting a file that is genuinely useful takes a little more thought.

This guide stays general on purpose. Every merchant system names its menus differently, and the menus change between versions. What does not change is what a good export contains and how to check it before anyone relies on it.

Decide what the file is for

Before you export anything, write one sentence about the purpose. "Every active product with its list price and unit" is a different export from "every customer price agreed in the last 2 years". A common mistake is trying to get everything into one file. Usually you want three:

• The product file: one row per product.
• The price file: one row per price, with who it applies to and when.
• The customer file: one row per account, with the group it belongs to.

The product file

For quoting, the product file needs only a handful of columns:

• Product code, exactly as your system holds it.
• Description, the one your staff recognise.
• Unit of sale: each, pack, metre, length, coil, bag, sheet.
• Pack size where you sell in packs.
• Manufacturer and manufacturer part number, if you hold them.
• Product group or category.
• An active or discontinued flag.

Leave out anything that is only there for the website or the warehouse, such as long marketing copy, bin locations or image links. They make the file larger and harder to check.

The price file

The price file is where exports tend to go wrong, because prices live at several levels. A useful price export has one row per price and these columns:

• Product code.
• Price level: list, group or customer.
• The group or customer the price applies to, blank for list prices.
• The price itself, in one currency per column or per file.
• Break quantity, if the price only applies from a certain quantity.
• Valid from and valid until dates.

If your system can only export prices in a wide layout, with one column per price level, that can work too, as long as the column names are clear and consistent from one export to the next.

Choosing CSV or Excel

Both are fine. CSV is plain text, so it is easy to inspect and hard to corrupt, but watch three things:

1. Encoding. Ask for UTF-8 if the export offers a choice, so symbols and unusual supplier names survive.
2. The delimiter. Commas are common, but some systems use semicolons or tabs. Any of them works if it is consistent.
3. Leading zeros. Opening a CSV in Excel can strip leading zeros from product codes and turn long codes into scientific notation. Check a few codes in a text editor before trusting what Excel shows.

Check the file before anyone uses it

Five quick checks catch the usual faults in an export:

• Count the rows against what you expect, roughly the number of active products.
• Sort by product code and look for duplicates.
• Filter for blank units and blank prices.
• Filter price rows for end dates that have already passed.
• Pick 10 products you know well and compare the file with the screen.

If any check fails, fix the export settings and export again, rather than editing the file by hand. A hand edited file cannot be reproduced next month.

Make it repeatable

A one-off export goes stale. Prices change, products are added, agreements end. Write down exactly how you made the export: the report or menu name, the filters, the columns and the format. If your system can schedule the export, use a fixed file name and a fixed folder, so anyone who relies on the file knows where to find the latest one.

How I use these files

When a merchant runs a pilot with QuoteClerk AI, this is exactly the flow. You export the catalogue and price list from your merchant system as CSV or XLSX, I draft quotes from them, and the approved quote comes out as a PDF for the customer plus a CSV. There is no native connection to merchant systems such as Kerridge K8 or OGL. Whether your system can import that CSV for quotes or orders is checked per system during the pilot; otherwise the approved lines are keyed in from the draft.

If you run Kerridge K8, the QuoteClerk AI for Kerridge K8 users page covers what to export. For OGL, see the QuoteClerk AI for OGL users page.