How to Bulk Import Order Templates with a CSV
Build order templates for one customer or two hundred from a single spreadsheet
When You'd Need This
You've got customers who buy the same things over and over. A restaurant reordering the same twenty items every Monday, a school district with a standing supply order, a hotel that just needs to top up whatever ran low last week. An order template puts exactly those products in front of them the moment they log in, so they're adjusting quantities instead of hunting through your catalog.
Building one by hand is no big deal. Building four hundred is a different story, and that's where most people find this article.
Here's the thing to know up front, because it surprises people... order templates don't come from your accounting or inventory system. There's no field you can set and no export you can run that will change what's on a customer's order template. Your products sync across, your pricing syncs across, but the order template itself is built and managed entirely on the Kinein side. The CSV import is how you build them at scale.
Decide This Before You Build the File
Kinein can attach an order template to your customers two ways, and you pick one and map only that one. Never both in the same import.
The difference isn't just who receives the template. It's how many templates get built.
- Account number. One company may have three separate people who each have their own login, and all three of those logins share the same account number. When you import against that account number, every login tied to it gets its own order template. They're separate versions... each of those customers can log in and edit their own copy, if that's what you want.
- Email address. This builds exactly one template, attached to that one person, since only one login can hold a given email address at a time.
So the question to answer is how your customer logins are set up:
Is there just one login per account number? Account number is fine, and it's the simplest path.
Are there several logins sharing one account number? Then you have a second decision to make. Do you want each of those people to have their own version of the order template that they can adjust independently? Or do you want them all working from the same template, so you only have to manage it once?
If you want them to share one, import it against the email address of a single contact, then manually attach the other logins at that company to the finished template. You'll almost certainly want that shared template set to admin controlled as well, which is covered in Step 3.
Heads up: That duplicating behavior is also why a blank account number is so destructive. Kinein doesn't skip empty cells... it reads the blank as a real value, finds every user in your system who also has no account number, and builds each of them their own copy of the template. On a site with retail buyers or hand-built portal logins, one empty cell can generate dozens of templates you now have to hunt down and delete. Map one identifier (either account number or email address), fill in every cell of it, and delete the other column entirely.
How to Set It Up
Heads up: The customer has to exist in Kinein before you can import a template for them. The import matches on whichever identifier you mapped (either account number or email address), so if that account hasn't synced over from your accounting system yet, those rows have nowhere to land. Get your customers in first, then import templates right behind them.
Step 1: Build the file
Start here rather than from scratch:
Download the order template import template (CSV)
| Column | Required? | What goes in it |
|---|---|---|
| Order Template Title | Required, on every row | What the template will be called when the customer sees it |
| Order Template Description | Optional | A label like "Monday dry goods." Handy when a customer has several |
| Customer Account Number | Required if this is your identifier | The customer's account number from your accounting system |
| Customer Email Address | Required if this is your identifier | The login email of the person getting this template |
| Customer Name | Not imported | Anything that helps you keep track while you build the file |
| Product Code | Required | Your product model or SKU code |
| Product Quantity | Required | The starting quantity for that line. A specific number, or zero |
Delete the identifier column you aren't using. If it isn't in the file, you can't accidentally map it, and you can't accidentally leave a cell blank in it. That single habit prevents the messiest failure this import has.
One row per product. Forty items on a customer's order template means forty rows, each repeating the same template title and the same identifier.
The title has to be identical on every row. That's how Kinein knows those forty rows belong to the same order template rather than forty different ones. A stray typo doesn't get corrected, it quietly creates a second template... "Weekly Produce" and "Weekly Prodcue" become two separate templates, each holding half the products. Copy the title down your column rather than retyping it.
Pro tip: Put something identifying in the title. On the Order Templates screen in your admin you'll see the title and how many customers it's attached to, but not who those customers are. If your templates are company specific, working the company name, the contact's name, or the account number into the title makes them findable by search and recognizable at a glance later. Less relevant for a promotional template you're sharing with everybody, but a real time-saver otherwise.
The description is the exception to the every-row rule. It only needs to appear once, on the first row where that template title is introduced. Leave it empty on every repeat of the same title.
About that Customer Name column. It's in the file on purpose, and it's the one column you simply won't map during the mapping step. There's no "do not import" setting involved... you just leave its dropdown alone and Kinein never reads it. Because nothing is imported from it, you can put whatever you find useful in there: the company name, the login user's first and last name, or both. The point is that when you're scrolling through a few thousand rows in Excel, you can see that account 532 is Customer ABC instead of squinting at a number and guessing.
Set your quantities. You've got two options here, and you can mix and match them in the same file.
If your customers reliably order the same amount of something every time, put that quantity in. Six cases of one thing, two of another... the template arrives pre-filled and they just add it to the cart.
Alternatively, set the quantity to zero. That turns the template into a checklist... the customer walks their storage room, punches in what they actually need, and anything left at zero simply doesn't go in the cart when they hit Add template to cart.
Leave pricing out of it. If your source spreadsheet has a price column, delete it. Pricing is dictated by your accounting system, and your customer's pricing rules will apply automatically. All the order template does is control which products appear and who they're attached to.
Step 2: Upload and map the fields
In your Kinein admin, go to Order Templates and click the CSV Import button at the top right of the page. Once your file is uploaded, you'll see your column headers down the left side with a dropdown next to each one. That dropdown is where you tell Kinein what each column actually is.
Plan on setting every one of these yourself. The importer will match Order Template Title and Order Template Description on its own, but nothing else maps automatically, even when your header names line up exactly. Work down the list and set each one:
| Your column | Map it to |
|---|---|
| Order Template Title | Order Template Title |
| Order Template Description | Order Template Description |
| Customer Account Number or Customer Email Address | The matching field. Map one, never both |
| Customer Name | Leave it unmapped |
| Product Code | Product Code |
| Product Quantity | Product Quantity |
Four mappings are mandatory: an identifier (account number or email), Order Template Title, Product Code, and Product Quantity. Miss any of them and Kinein throws an error and blocks the upload. The message you'll see is:
Customer number/Email Address, order template title, product code and quantity are required fields.
Once all your necessary fields are mapped, upload the file. On a large file, stay on the page. The browser has to finish sending the whole thing, and navigating away mid-upload will leave you with a partial import to untangle. Wait for the confirmation, however long it takes.
Pro tip: Rename the Customer Name header in your own file to something like Customer Name - do not map. Six months from now when you're doing this again, your spreadsheet will remind you.
Step 3: Check two settings you may want to change
Your templates are built and your customers can use them right now. Neither of the following is required... they're settings worth knowing about, because the defaults may not be what you're after.
Do you want these admin controlled? By default, imported templates are not admin controlled, which means the customer can edit them, add products, and remove products. Setting a template to admin controlled locks the product list down: the people it's shared with can't add items, can't remove items, and can't change what's on it. If you're maintaining these lists on your customers' behalf, that's what you want.
Rather than hunting through hundreds of records, go to the Order Templates list, find the filter just above the blue Search button, set it to user controlled, and search. That gives you a clean list of exactly the ones you haven't switched over yet.
Do you want them changing quantities? There's a companion setting called Allow Customer To Override Quantity, and it's checked by default. That default assumes you're happy for customers to adjust amounts.
Which one you want depends on what your template is for:
- A preset order - a fixed combination of products and quantities you want ordered exactly as built. Uncheck Allow Customer To Override Quantity.
- A curated product list - you're controlling which products they can order from, but they decide how much. Leave it checked.
Attach any additional contacts. Every import has to attach the template to somebody... there's no way to build an unassigned template and sort out the recipients later. So when several people need to work from the same template, import it against a single email address, then open the finished template and add the others by hand.
That post-import step is the whole reason to prefer the email route when a company has multiple logins. Import by account number instead and you don't get one shared template to attach people to... you get a pile of separate templates that each have to be managed individually. And if you're sharing one template across several contacts, you're probably going to want it admin controlled, which means you as the site owner make any edits to it from then on.
Can I Update an Existing Order Template by Importing Again?
Partly, yes. If you import using the same template title and point it at the same customer who already has that template, Kinein adds your new products and quantities to the template that's already there. It doesn't create a second one, and it doesn't wipe out what's on it. That makes the import a decent way to grow a template.
What you can't do is shrink one. There's no way to remove products through an import. Taking items off an order template means opening that template, removing the lines by hand, and saving... one template at a time.
Worth planning around if you're maintaining templates for a lot of customers, because a single discontinued product can mean opening a lot of templates.
Things to Watch For
- Master accounts usually shouldn't have templates. If a parent account exists just to receive invoices and pay bills, and the actual ordering happens at the sub-accounts, put the templates on the sub-accounts only.
- One person can have several templates in the same file. If a customer needs a Monday template and a Thursday template, put both in one import against the same email address. You'll get one of each, exactly as you'd expect.
- Think about the order you provision new customers in. If order templates are central to how your customers use the site, it's worth sequencing this deliberately. Granting web access in your accounting system triggers the invitation email, so build the customer's template ahead of time, then grant access, run a sync, and import the template right after. That way it's waiting for them when they follow the invitation.
Still Stuck?
If your import ran but some templates didn't show up, or the ones that did show up landed on the wrong customer, email us at support@kinein.com with the file you uploaded and we'll walk through the mapping with you. Nine times out of ten it's an account number that doesn't match or an account that hadn't synced over yet, and both are quick to sort out.