Importing and Exporting Products

Importing and Exporting Products

When starting to use Mobileforce CPQ, one of the first activities performed is to populate the product catalog, specifically by creating (a) Price Books (b) Product Categories and (c) Products, and (d) Pricing for products. Since, for many customers, Products and Prices sit in different systems (and often, none of these are in their CRM), Mobileforce provides flexibility in mass importing products (and price book entries). In addition to this article which describes importing products, please also see how to import price books Importing and Exporting Prices from Price Book

By default, Mobileforce tables can be exported (and imported). To change the default behavior, and suppress export of tables, an admin can explicitly prevent exports by setting an application level property

You can batch import multiple products into Mobileforce CPQ by uploading an import file in .csv format, enabling faster batch changes to products at once, rather than making the necessary changes to each product individually.

To correctly import all of the products in batch, you must ensure that the file is formatted properly, where each row/line of the file lists a product to be imported as well as the other desired fields.

Caution:

Product imports behave differently from price book imports (which are accessed from the Price Book screen).

The product import allows (but requires) you to select a price book, whereas the price book item import can be done only within a specific price book. If your products have multiple price book entries (due to having multiple prices in multiple currencies), then you must use price book imports, and create multiple .csv import files, one for each price book (currency).

To import a product import file, from the Products page, click the Import button.

This action would trigger a pop-up dialogue

From the Import Products pop-up window, click the Choose File button to select the import file from your local system. If you have multiple Price Books, click the drop-down list and select the desired book.

The products in the .csv file are imported to Mobileforce where they can be edited, as needed, from the Products page.

You can import products with prices, with some limitations. Only simple pricing is supported, (e.g., no block/volume/tiered/tagged pricing, only a single pricebook, no starting or expiration dates.). You can only import complex pricing from the pricebook import screen.

Caution:

You must also specify an existing price book (see the Price Book drop down in the pop-up dialog above), for your product import. This means that all the prices in the product import csv must be of the same currency as specified in the price book.

If your products have multiple prices i.e., multiple price book entries, corresponding to multiple currencies, you'll have to upload multiple csv files, one for each price book (i.e. each currency).

Product updates (via imports or otherwise) do impact quotes.

Caution:

If a product is updated (e.g., a change in price), then all existing quotes that reference the product in line items will also be updated. If you don't want existing quotes to be modified, you need to update effective date of such products to a future date so that the new price changes won’t show for existing quotes. Alternatively, you could also make the product inactive and create a new product in its place in which case existing quotes will not be impacted.

Creating Import Files

Product import files are .csv files with specific headings that match the fields in the Mobileforce CPQ database. MobileForce has created a csv template that you can use to ensure that the fields are properly matched.

Download the template from the Import Products pop-up window, and enter the products using a text editor or spreadsheet program (such as Excel or Google Sheets).

Tip
If you've already done an import or created a set of products, we strongly recommend that you first export the products into a csv, copy that csv into a new "import" file, and then use the new "import" csv as the starting point for the next import. This way, should there be an issue with the import, you still have your previous version of the products in the original downloaded csv from which you can import and recover your products.

The Product Import template file has the following fields:

Name	Code	Description	Categories 	UOM	**Unit Price** Image	Qty Editable	Qty Default	Qty Min	Qty Max	Qty Step	Qty Parent Mul	Price Recur	Dis Enabled	Dis Unit	Dis Pct Min	Dis Pct Max	Dis Amt Min	Dis Amt Max	Selectable	Active	ACL	Eff. Date	Exp. Date	External ID	Has Price	Parent Product Name	Parent Product Code

Organizing the Product Import csv file

The following considerations must be taken into account, when creating csv files for product import:

  1. No columns are "required".
  2. However, you must provide either a non-empty product name or code.
  3. If both a name and code are provided, the import would use the name/code pair to locate the product. If that fails, the import would try to locate the product with the given code. If that fails, it would try to find the product with the given name. If that fails, it will create a new product for product imports or generate an error for price imports.
  4. Some fields above are optional i.e., you can leave the values of such fields as blank, or entirely remove the field (column) from your CSV file. An example of an optional field that doesn't need to exist in the CSV file is the Unit Price. If this field does not exist in the CSV, then imports will not change the price.

Caution:

For MobileForce CPQ, only the product name/code pair must be unique. One can have products with the same name but different codes, or different names but the same code. This could cause issues if a user uses a CSV file to update both a product's name and code, or to swap names or codes between products. For such cases, the wrong product may be updated, or a new product may be inadvertently created.

Caution:

Mobileforce CPQ also provides a prop key (only for use by Mobileforce Admins) cpq-product-unique-code which can take a value 0 or 1 depending on whether you wish to require all entries in the csv to have unique codes (value 1) or you wish to allow duplicate codes (value 0).

  1. If a column is left out or if its cell value is the empty string (''), it is set to a default value.
  2. Each column has its own default value. Hence, for a CSV import with a missing column, the field for that column will be updated and set to its default value. The only exception to this is the product's 'Unit Price' column. If the 'Unit Price' column is not specified or if its value is the empty string, the price for that product will not be updated.
  3. If the CSV has a column that the import doesn't recognize, it will ignore it.
  4. Import will use both the columns' English names and their localized names when determining the columns to import.
  5. Empty rows are ignored.
  6. Each column has an associated type and default value. Allowed types are: text, int, decimal, currency, percent, boolean, date, and datetime.
  7. Additionally, text values can have a specified list of allowable picklist values.
  8. If a text field is a picklist, only one of the allowed picklist values is allowed if it is not empty. If it is empty, it uses the default value. CPQ will abort the import if one of the cells in the CSV has an invalid value.

Caution:

If you are using a spreadsheet program to edit the import file, ensure that you save it as a .csv file.

Incremental Product Import

Product imports through csv also support incremental import.

Caution:

A product import should not delete any existing products. If an imported object does not exist yet, it will be created. Otherwise, the existing product will be updated with the imported product's data. Products not listed in the CSV file are left alone. If you don't specify a 'Unit Price' column for the imported products, the product's prices will not be updated.

Price book imports act similarly, with one exception. If you specify a price book item for a product, all old price book items with the same tag, effective date, and expiration date will be deleted.

Additionally, you can export a .csv file of the products already created for Mobileforce CPQ, update the file with new products, and import it to Mobileforce CPQ.

Exporting

To export your entire product list to a .csv file, click the Export button. Mobileforce saves the list to the default downloads directory for your browser.

You can export data to keep it as a backup, as well as edit the data in a separate application.

Caution:

Exporting products will never show the 'List Price' column in the exported CSV file.

Importing Products from the Price Book page

In addition to importing products directly from the products page, Mobileforce also lets you import prices from the Price Book page.