Move your stock spreadsheet into Bookatu without retyping it

Say you already run your retail on a spreadsheet. One row per product, with columns for Brand, Item, SKU, In Stock, Reorder At, Price, and a Sale Price for the things you have marked down. It works. The last thing you want to hear is that moving to a real system means typing all of it in again, one product at a time, on a small screen after closing. So here is the good news. You do not have to. You can hand Bookatu the sheet you already keep.

Save your sheet as a CSV, then import it

A CSV is just your spreadsheet saved as plain text. In Excel or Google Sheets you pick Save As, or Download, and choose CSV. Then in Bookatu you go to your products page, open Import, and upload that file. Bookatu reads it row by row and creates a product for each one. Up to 500 rows go in at once. If you would rather start from what Bookatu already has, use Export first. That gives you a full stock sheet you can edit in your spreadsheet and send straight back through Import.

You keep your own column names

This is the part that saves the retyping. Most tools make you match their fields to yours before anything imports, which is its own little chore. Bookatu recognises the names people actually use. A column called Item or Product becomes the product name. In Stock becomes the number on hand. Reorder At becomes the point where a product flags as low. Brand, SKU and Price come across as themselves. You do not sit there renaming headers to match a template. You upload the sheet you already have.

A Sale Price shows the old price struck through

If your sheet has a Sale Price column, Bookatu treats it as the current selling price and shows the regular Price struck through next to it, the way a real markdown looks. It only does this when the sale price is actually lower than the regular one. Put the same number in both and nothing gets crossed out. So the retail markdowns you already track in your spreadsheet arrive looking like markdowns, not like two prices sitting side by side.

Matching SKUs update, they do not duplicate

The SKU is the code that makes this safe to do more than once. When you import, Bookatu looks at the SKU on each row. If that SKU already belongs to a product, the row updates that product. If the SKU is new, it makes a new product. So you can import today, sell for a month, then import an updated sheet next month and nothing doubles up. Same file, same SKUs, one clean update.

• First move. Bring your whole spreadsheet in once and skip the manual entry.
• A price change across a range. Send an updated sheet and let the matching SKUs take the new prices.
• A new delivery of lines you already stock. Update the ones that match and add the genuinely new ones in the same file.
• A seasonal markdown. Fill in the Sale Price column and re-import to show the old price struck through.

A price-only sheet changes only prices

Sometimes all you want to change is money, not the whole product. A slim sheet does exactly that. If you upload a file with just the name, SKU and price columns, Bookatu updates only those and leaves everything else alone. Your stock counts do not reset. Your photos, descriptions and categories stay where they are. This is the sheet to use when a supplier raises prices and you want the new numbers in without risking the rest of your catalogue.

Hand the system the sheet you already keep. That is the whole idea.

None of this asks you to change how you already work. Keep your spreadsheet if you like it. Export a fresh copy from Bookatu whenever you want a clean stock sheet, edit it where you are comfortable, and send it back. The point is that your stock only gets typed once, and you already did that. Bookatu just meets your sheet where it is.