From Excel to the till in an afternoon

The five columns you need

With these five you can already work. The rest can come later:

• Name of the product, exactly as you want it on screen and on the receipt.
• Category, which is what you use to search at the till later.
• Selling price, with comma or decimal point, but always the same separator.
• VAT rate that applies (21, 10 or 4). Leave it blank and the company's general rate is used.
• Barcode if you have one. If not, it can be generated.

The most common mistake: price with or without VAT?

In retail the price on the shelf normally includes VAT. If your spreadsheet holds prices excluding VAT and you import them as they are, you will sell about 21 % too cheap. Before importing, decide which mode you work in and check the first receipt with a calculator in hand.

Watch out for Excel turning numbers into dates

Excel sometimes turns "7.95" into a date or into seven thousand nine hundred and fifty. Before saving, format the price column as a number with two decimals and save as UTF-8 CSV. Strange values? That is why.

Photos and barcodes

You do not have to add photos by hand: if your products carry a barcode, many programs download the image from a public database. And if two products share a code, check it is not duplicated: two items with the same barcode is the error we see most.

The last step: check

After importing, open ten items at random — the expensive ones and the cheap ones — and check price, VAT and category. Ten minutes of checking saves you a month of till discrepancies.