Switching to BarSight from Ollie: Your Step-by-Step Checklist

Thinking about leaving Ollie for BarSight? Good news: you do not have to rebuild your brewery from scratch. Your ingredients, your sales history and your customers can all come across in a handful of CSV uploads. This is the order we recommend doing it in, with a link to the full guide for every step.

The Switching Checklist

1. Set up your package groups. Define the can, bottle and keg formats you sell. See Defining Packaging Groups.
2. Import the BC LDB product list. (BC breweries) One upload brings in the LDB products, SKUs and prices. See Importing Products and Pricing from the BC LDB Price List.
3. Set up your facilities. Tanks and their sizes, which tanks are excise (taxable), plus your Store, GST and PST numbers. See Brewery Facilities Explained and Brewery Settings.
4. Import your raw ingredients. Malt, hops, yeast and the rest, with prices and on-hand counts. See Importing Brewery Inventory Items.
5. Import your sales history. This creates your orders, products and customers in one go. See Importing Brewery Orders.
6. Re-import your customer list to fill in emails, addresses and phone numbers. See Import Customers from CSV.
7. Clean up the import. Merge duplicates and tidy names. See Cleaning Up After an Import.
8. Create the products you have in stock right now. So your shelves and cold room match reality on day one. See Importing Packaged Products.
9. Bring over your recipes, or let your next batch create its own. See Creating Products and Recipes and Creating Batch Recipes On The Fly.

Why This Order?

Each step sets up something the next one needs. Package groups come first because your sales import matches packages against them. The LDB list comes next so imported sales find real SKUs instead of creating new products. Facilities come before sales because the whole sales file is imported into the facility you pick.

What to Expect at Each Step

Package groups and the LDB list

Package groups describe how a product is sold, such as a 24 x 355 ml can case or a 50 L keg. Set up the handful you actually use, then import the LDB price list so your products and SKUs match what the government expects in your reports. Outside BC, skip the LDB step and your products will come from your sales import.

Facilities

Create your production facility and add each tank with its size. Mark every excise vessel as Taxable, usually your brite tanks and serving vessels, so batches are not blocked at packaging time. In BC, enter your Store Number, GST Number and PST Number on the facility. They print on your order PDFs and feed the LDB report.

Ingredients

An Ollie raw materials export already has one row per lot, which is the shape BarSight wants. Rename a column or two to match, and the preview screen shows you exactly what will be created before anything is saved. The inventory guide has a column-by-column table for Ollie files.

Sales history

An Ollie sales export has one row per line item, and most of its columns are recognized automatically. Two things to do first: delete the Subtotal column, because in Ollie it is the price times quantity before tax, and remove any credit lines (negative quantities), which are skipped. The import creates closed orders, so your history is there for reporting without touching your stock counts. The orders guide has the full Ollie section.

Tax can need a quick adjustment after any import. Compare a few order totals against your old records, and contact support if something is off. We will correct it for you.

Customers, after the fact

Can I re-import a customer list after the sales import? Yes, and it is the best way to do it. Your sales file usually has customer names but not emails or addresses, so the sales import creates the customers by name only. Upload a customer CSV afterwards and BarSight matches each row to the existing customer by exact name, then fills in the details.

• Cells with data replace what is stored. Blank cells leave the existing value alone, so a sparse file will not wipe anything out.
• Names must match exactly. If your sales file says Prairie Taproom and your customer list says Prairie Taproom Ltd, you will get a second customer. The cleanup guide shows how to merge them.
• Contact columns add new contacts each time the file is imported, so include them once and do not re-upload the same file.

Stock on hand and recipes

Imported sales do not add or remove stock, so the last jobs are to create the products you physically have on the shelf right now and enter their counts. After that, you have two options for recipes. Rebuild the ones you already use on the Recipes page, or skip the data entry entirely: start a new batch, let BarSight create the product and recipe on the fly, and use Save Batch as Recipe from Batch Operations once you are happy with it. Most breweries end up doing a bit of both.

Ready to Make the Move?

Most of this is uploading files you can export from Ollie in an afternoon. If you get stuck on any step, reach out and we will help you through it. Register here to try it.

Ollie is a trademark of its owner. BarSight is not affiliated with or endorsed by Ollie. The name is used here only to describe which files our importers can read.