Every client's stock, in one clean import

A worked example, not a customer testimonial.

The job

You keep the books for several clients, each with stock, and your accounting system — solid, paid for, decades old — imports tab-delimited files with the columns in a fixed order and no header row. It predates CSV dialects, never mind APIs. The job is to get each client’s counted stock into it without retyping.

Why this works at all

The TXT export exists because a real user needed exactly this: a legacy importer that reads columns by position. So the export is tab-delimited, header-free (a positional importer would read a header as a bogus first record), and the column order is whatever order you tap the fields in. That is the entire mapping interface, and it is enough.

Set up: a group per client

Create one group per client in the dashboard: Meyer GmbH, Van Dijk, Studio Krug. Every scan taken for a client goes in their group, and nothing bleeds between them — exports scope to a group.

Count a client

At the client’s site, scan their stock into their group. No signal in their basement archive? The queue holds scans with capture time and GPS and replays them in order when you are back in daylight.

Shape the file once

Open the export picker and tap the fields in the order your importer reads them — say barcode, name, quantity, category — and nothing else. Choose TXT. The selection and order are remembered, so this is a one-time setup, not a ritual.

Import

Export the client’s group, feed the file to the importer, watch zero complaints scroll by. Repeat per client — each is now minutes: scan, export, import.

What this playbook leaned on

Groups as the per-client unit and export fields and formats for the TXT rules. If your system grows an API someday, the REST API quickstart is the same data without the file in the middle.