Update Square unit costs from a supplier spreadsheet
Square uses unit cost for cost of goods sold and margin. How to bring in a supplier's new costs and leave the rest of your catalog alone.
Unit cost is what you paid for one unit. Square stores it on each variation and uses it for cost of goods sold, profit and profit margin. If the cost is two price lists old, nothing warns you. Your margin reports all come out a little better than the truth.
Ways to change unit cost
- Receive a purchase order. Square saves the unit cost for you, which works well for stock you actually booked in.
- Edit items in the Dashboard. This is fine for a few items and slow once you pass twenty.
- Import a file. When a supplier changes four hundred costs at once, this is the only practical way.
This guide covers the import. You start with your own Square export and the new price list. You end with the same export, where only the cost cells have changed.
Use your own export
Square matches existing items by the Token column, and only your export has the tokens. If you start from a blank template, you get four hundred new items next to the four hundred you already had. Export first, edit that file and import the same file back.
Match the products
Give the Square tool your export and the price list together. It matches products by SKU first, then GTIN, then exact name. A close name match shows up as a suggestion, and you confirm each one yourself.
Open the Square tool to try it with your own file.
The change list
The Review step counts what changed. A cost that stayed the same is left out, and a move under half a percent counts as rounding. What remains is worth your time: costs that went up, costs that went down and products the supplier no longer lists.
| SKU | AC-10042 |
|---|---|
| name | Olive Oil 1 L |
| cost | was 4.10, now 4.55, up 11.0% |
| price | 8.99, unchanged |
| margin | was 54.4%, now 49.4% |
Margin tells you whether a cost rise needs a price rise. Each row shows it against the price Square has now. If a product has slipped under your floor, you see it before you approve anything.
Import the result
- Approve the rows you want and reject the rest.
- Download the file. It is your export with the approved costs in Default Unit Cost. Every other cell stays exactly as Square wrote it. New supplier products go at the end with a blank Token, so Square creates them as new items.
- Import it from the Dashboard, the same place you exported it from.