Data import

Flow Retail provides powerful and flexible tools for importing data, making it easy to set up and manage your system via spreadsheets.

You can import everything from products — including variants such as sizes, colors, and other attributes — to prices, purchase costs, and inventory levels.

In addition, customer data, product groups, brands, and suppliers can all be imported.

Supported data to be imported

Data	Fields
Products	All + Properties
Brands	Name
Product Groups	Name + hierarchy structure
Inventory	Quantity + cost price
Price lists	Prices
Suppliers	Name
Supplier prices	Prices
Customers	Name, type of customer

We do NOT support importing historical sales. The main reason for this is that this type of data can have a very complex setup and relation to other fields, and so quickly becomes a very extensive task, seldom worth all the efforts and time.

When switching from another POS system over to Flow Retail, we recommend to use the old system for lookup over a time-limited period of 6-12 months, and to get a full export of all the historical data 5-10 years back in time, mainly for legal reasons.

Note that it is always the customer's responsibility to keep their receipt in terms of guarantee, etc.

Getting started

All import files must in the XLSX file format, the modern Excel file standard.

XLSX is widely used, highly flexible, and supported by virtually all spreadsheet tools — including Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, LibreOffice, and OpenOffice.

Define your templates

When importing data, you first need to create a template where you define/"map" the columns from the spreadsheet to the corresponding fields in Flow Retail.

The available fields are different depending on the type of template you are defining. So, for the product template there are basically 50+ fields to choose from, while on the stock template there are just a handful.

You can have as many templates as you want within each type of data, and so you can for example have one template for each specific supplier, if they give you different spreadsheets with their data, and you want to use their spreadsheet as-is, typically for PRICAT files.