Moving from a spreadsheet: importing units, clients and stock by paste

Where you can paste

• Places › a place › Units — unit names, floors or streets, legal addresses, running costs.
• People › Clients — names, contact details, unit, dates, rent, deposits. A unit that does not exist yet is created on the way.
• Inventory › Record stock — item names and quantities. Items that already exist get their stock topped up, not duplicated.
• Money › Expenses — date, description, amount, unit or General.

How the columns are recognised

If your first row is a header, the platform reads it. If it is not, it guesses from the content: something that looks like a date is a date, something with a peso sign or thousands separators is an amount, something short and alphanumeric at the start of a line is a unit. When it cannot tell, it asks you to pick the column from a dropdown — once, and it remembers for the next paste.

Matching, not duplicating

Every row is checked against what already exists before anything is written. A unit named "2E" in a place that already has a 2E is the same unit; a client with the same phone number is the same client; a stock item with the same name is the same item. Matched rows are updated, and the preview says so in iris. If you really do have two different people with one phone number, change one of them in the spreadsheet before pasting.

What it fixes, and tells you about

Commas in numbers, dates in day-first or month-first order, stray spaces, mixed capitals in unit names. Each fix is shown in amber in the preview with the original beside it. It never fixes silently.

Start small

Paste five rows, check, import. Then paste five hundred. The preview is the same either way, and the five-row rehearsal will show you whether your spreadsheet's columns are in the shape you think they are.