Switching to BarSight from Excel, LibreOffice or Google Sheets

Your brewery runs on spreadsheets. Maybe Excel, maybe LibreOffice (respect, you are one of the cool ones), maybe Google Sheets with eleven tabs and a colour code only you understand. Good news: a spreadsheet is the easiest thing in the world to import from, because every BarSight importer speaks CSV, and every spreadsheet program can save one. Here is the order we recommend, 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.

Spreadsheet Prep: The Five Minute Version

A CSV file is just text, so anything clever in your spreadsheet will not survive the trip. Before you export anything:

• One header row, then data. No title rows, no merged cells, no blank lines between sections.
• Colours are not data. If a row shaded orange means "paid" or "sold out", add a real column that says so. CSV forgets all formatting.
• One fact per cell. Split "Prairie Pale Ale 24x355ml" into a product column and a package column if you can.
• Save as CSV. In Excel it is Save As, CSV UTF-8. In LibreOffice and Google Sheets it is Save As or Download as CSV. Only the current tab is saved, so export each tab separately.
• Use the templates. Every import window has a sample file to download. Match its column names and BarSight will recognize your columns automatically.

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 and sales history

Your ingredient tab becomes the inventory import, one row per lot if you hold more than one. Your invoice or sales log becomes the orders import: one row per line item, with the order number repeated on each row. You do not need to create products or package groups first. Anything the import cannot match is created, and you review the matches in a preview before anything is saved. Sales are imported as closed orders, so your history is there for reporting without touching your stock counts.

Tax can need a quick adjustment after any import, especially for mixed rates or tax-exempt sales. Compare a few order totals against your 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. A sales log usually has customer names but not emails or addresses, so the sales import creates the customers by name only. Upload your customer tab 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 tab says Prairie Taproom and your customer tab says Prairie Taproom Ltd, you will get a second customer. The cleanup guide shows how to merge them. Running a find and replace in your spreadsheet first saves the trouble.
• 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 Retire the Spreadsheet?

You will not be deleting it, of course. It will sit in a folder, a monument to everything you tracked by hand. But from here on, BarSight does the counting. If you get stuck on any step, reach out and we will help you through it. Register here to try it.

Excel, LibreOffice and Google Sheets are trademarks of their respective owners. BarSight is not affiliated with or endorsed by them. The names are used here only to describe which programs can save the CSV files our importers read.