---
title: "Adding your products without spending three evenings typing"
source: https://www.lskhata.com/blog/add-products-without-typing-for-days
category: "Getting started"
language: en
published: 2026-08-12
reading_time: 7 min
---

# Adding your products without spending three evenings typing

_Three ways to build a product list — as you sell, in a batch, or pasted from a spreadsheet — and which one suits the size of your shop._

## In short
- Under about 60 items, add them as you sell. The list builds itself and contains only what you actually stock.
- Over a few hundred, paste from a spreadsheet into the grid rather than typing records one at a time.
- Whatever the method, cost price is the field worth the effort — without it no profit figure works.
- Do not import a list you have not cleaned. A catalogue with duplicate and dead items is worse than a short one.

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

_[Figure: The grid takes a paste from Excel or Google Sheets. One Save writes the batch, and cells are checked as they arrive rather than after you have finished.]_

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.

**A dirty import is worse than no import.** Six hundred products where forty are duplicates and ninety are discontinued gives you a search box that returns the wrong thing at the counter. Every one of those wrong hits costs a few seconds in front of a customer, and after a week people stop using the search and start adding items manually again — with the duplicates still sitting there.

### 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.

## Common questions

**Can I import my products from Excel or Google Sheets?**

Yes. Every major list in Khata opens as an editable grid, and you can paste straight from a spreadsheet into it, then save the whole batch at once. Cells are checked as they land, so a price in a name column is flagged rather than silently accepted.

**How many products should I add before I start billing?**

One. You can add items at the moment you sell them, so the catalogue builds itself from real sales. Typing the whole list first delays the useful part and tends to produce a list padded with things you no longer stock.

**What fields do I really need on a product?**

A name, a selling price and a unit will let you bill. A cost price will let you see profit, which is the reason most people wanted the software in the first place. Category, threshold and your own custom columns are useful later and add nothing on day one.

**Does Khata track expiry dates or batch numbers?**

No. There is no expiry-date alert and no batch-level tracking. You can record an expiry as a custom column on a product, but nothing will warn you when it approaches, so if dated stock is a large part of your business you will still need to track that separately.