An apparel importer with 25 staff and 12,000 SKUs ran its entire operation on spreadsheets. There was a spreadsheet for inventory, one for purchase orders, one for the bank, and a legendary file called “Final Final Stock 2023 v4” that everyone knew was wrong but nobody dared delete. When two different versions of a popular shirt showed different quantities, the owner assumed one was a typo. It wasn’t. It was two different suppliers’ versions of the same shirt, with the same name in two different styles, entered years apart.
The old system wasn’t the problem. The old data was.
The first attempt to move to a proper system had failed for a simple reason: the team tried to import all Excel files as they were. Every SKU code, supplier name, and unit of measure came from a different era. One item was measured in cartons on purchase orders and in pieces in the sales file. Nobody had defined which one was the base unit, so the system showed some orders needing 600,000 pieces when the warehouse held 600.
ERPNext Consulting took a different approach: clean the data outside the system first, and make the clean version visible to the people who know the products every day — not to an IT specialist.
Five rules that made the migration boring
- Do not merge products that look similar “to save time.” Create them as separate records and mark the old one inactive later. Merging without proper research creates a permanent mess.
- Agree on one base unit per product for all purchases and sales, and enter that as a fixed rule. Pieces and cartons can live as packaging details, but they never drive the stock count.
- Let the purchasing manager review the final product list in small batches — no one stares at 12,000 records in a day. Batches of 500 worked well here.
- Import inventory balances only after a physical count of that exact storage location. Never carry over a spreadsheet balance that hasn’t been verified on a shelf.
- Hold a full dress rehearsal one weekend before the real go-live, and make the whole warehouse team practice receiving and picking from the new system with a small batch of items.
The dress rehearsal that saved the launch
During the rehearsal, the team discovered that mobile barcode scanning into the new system returned the wrong bin for about 40 SKUs because the old location codes had been typed into Excel with inconsistent spaces. Fixing that before the real cutover took two hours. Since the go-live, the warehouse finds 99.6% of all items within two minutes. In the old world, the owner would have thought that target was a joke.
A good migration is more about convincing people to look at one clean list than about the technology. ERPNext Consulting’s consultants spent most of their time sitting with the purchasing manager, asking “is this the same product as this?” until the team themselves realized how much energy the old spreadsheets were consuming. The system will only ever be as clean as the master data you feed it on day one. Spend the extra week cleaning now, and you will never spend a month reconciling the mess later.