There are three honest ways to get a product list into a billing app, and the right one depends almost entirely on how many items you carry. Choosing the wrong one is how people lose a weekend.
Under sixty items: add as you sell
A tea shop, a small eatery, a stall with a tight range — the catalogue is small enough that it will complete itself within a fortnight of normal trading. Add each item the first time you sell it. You will never type a product you do not sell, the prices will be the ones you actually charge, and there is no evening spent on data entry.
The one discipline this needs: when you add an item mid-sale, put the cost price in at the same time. It is the field everyone skips because the customer is waiting, and it is the field that every profit report depends on.
A few hundred: paste it in
- 1
Get the list into a spreadsheet first
One row per product, one column each for name, selling price, cost price and unit. If you already have a list from a supplier or an old system, this is usually a matter of deleting columns rather than typing.
- 2
Clean it before it goes anywhere
Remove anything you have not stocked in six months, and check for the same item appearing twice under two spellings. This is the step that decides whether the catalogue is useful or annoying.
- 3
Open the products grid and paste
The grid accepts a paste from Excel or Google Sheets directly. Columns line up by position, so make sure your spreadsheet's column order matches the grid's before you paste.
- 4
Fix what the grid flags, then Save once
Cells are validated as they land — a price where a name should be, a unit that is not recognised. Fix those, then one Save writes the whole batch. Undo covers the entire paste if it went in wrong.
The fields, in order of how much they earn you
| Field | What it buys you |
|---|---|
| Name | Findability at the counter. Write it the way you would say it, not the way the carton does. |
| Selling price | The bill. Use what you charge, not the printed MRP. |
| Cost price | Every profit and margin figure in the app. This is the one that matters most and is skipped most. |
| Unit | Correct stock arithmetic. kg, g, litre, ml, piece, dozen, packet and box are all supported. |
| Category | Grouping in reports. Genuinely useful past a hundred items, pointless below thirty. |
| Reorder threshold | Low-stock alerts. Best set after a month, when you know what actually runs out. |
| Your own columns | Anything the standard fields do not carry — a shelf location, a supplier code, an expiry date you will check yourself. |
Naming, which sounds trivial and is not
The product name is a search key before it is a label. At the counter you will type two or three characters and expect the right thing. Names that begin with a brand you never say out loud, or that start with a size, make that search useless — you end up scrolling a list while somebody waits.
- Lead with the word you would say: "Rice sona masoori 5 kg", not "5 kg sona masoori rice".
- Keep sizes at the end, so the same product in three sizes sorts together.
- Pick one spelling and stay with it. "Atta" and "Aata" as two products is how a catalogue rots.
- Do not put the price in the name. It changes, and then the name is a lie that also breaks your search.
A catalogue is not a record of everything you have ever sold. It is a list of what you can sell today, which is a much shorter and much more useful thing.