Update Square unit costs from a supplier spreadsheet
Unit cost is what one unit cost you. Square keeps it against the variation and uses it for cost of goods sold, profit and profit margin. A cost that is two price lists out of date does not announce itself. It just makes every margin report slightly wrong, in the optimistic direction.
Three ways in, and when each is right
- Receiving a purchase order. Square saves the unit cost automatically, which is ideal for stock you actually booked in.
- Editing items in the Dashboard. Fine for a handful, slow past twenty.
- A bulk import. The only practical route when a supplier moves four hundred costs at once.
This guide is about the third. The input is your own Square export plus the new price list. The output is the same export with the cost cells changed and nothing else touched.
Why the export, and not the blank template
Square matches existing items on the Token column, and only your export carries the tokens. Start from a blank template and you create four hundred new items next to the four hundred you already had. So export first, edit that file, and send the same file back.
Match, then review
Drop the export and the price list together below. Products are matched on SKU first, then GTIN, then the exact name, and close name matches are offered as suggestions you confirm one at a time rather than applied for you.
Read the change list, not the file
The compare step counts what moved. A cost that did not move is not a change, and a movement under half a percent is treated as rounding rather than news. What is left is the list worth your attention: the costs that rose, the ones that fell, and the products the supplier has stopped listing.
SKU AC-10042
name Olive Oil 1 L
cost 4.10 -> 4.55 (+11.0%)
price 8.99 -> 8.99
margin 54.4% -> 49.4%Margin is the number that decides whether a cost rise needs a price rise. It is shown per row against the price Square holds now, so a product that has quietly slipped under your floor is visible before you approve anything.
Approve, export, import
Approve the rows you accept and reject the rest. The download is your export with the approved costs written into Default Unit Cost, every other cell copied exactly as Square wrote it, and any product the supplier has added appended at the end with a blank Token so Square creates it. Import it from the Dashboard the same way you exported it.