Skip to content
ESEN

Import your catalog

Products, kits and clients ready to quote in seconds, one by one or from a CSV.

The catalog is what your team searches and adds when quoting. With it, the name, unit and price of each item always come out the same, and Cord can calculate your margin live. It lives in Products, in the sidebar, with two tabs: Catalog and Kits.

Requirements

  • Products permission to create, edit and import products and to manage kits.
  • Clients permission to import clients.
  • Plan limits: how many products and clients can exist at once depends on your plan (see Limits by plan).

Create a product

  1. In Products, select + New product (or Create › Product in the top bar).
  2. Choose what you sell: Product, Service, or Subscription or license. It only changes the suggested units (unit and box, hour and project, month and license); it doesn’t limit anything else.
  3. Enter the Name (required) and, optionally, the SKU, the Unit, and a Description. The unit is free text: pick a suggestion or type your own.
  4. Enter the Selling price, before taxes, in your account’s currency.
  5. Optional: under Your cost enter what it costs you. Cord shows how much you earn or lose per unit and calculates the margin when quoting. Your client never sees the cost.
  6. Optional: under Tax, choose the rate this product brings into a quote or invoice (shown when your tax catalog has more than one rate).
  7. Mexico only, optional: assign its SAT keys (see below).
  8. Optional: add Volume pricing (see below).
  9. Choose the Status (Active or Inactive) and select Save product.
Edit product modal for a service: type of sale Service, name Implementation consulting, SKU CONS-IMPL-HR and unit hour. Selling price 1800 MXN per hour and cost 950 MXN; the margin bar reads You earn $850.00 MXN per unit · margin 47%. Tax IVA 8% región fronteriza. Under E-invoicing (SAT, Mexico), key 81111500 (Ingeniería de software o hardware) and the automatic unit key HUR · Hora. Two volume prices: from 20 hours at $1,650.00 MXN and from 50 at $1,500.00 MXN. Status Active and, at the bottom, Delete, Cancel and Save product.

An inactive product is no longer offered when quoting, but keeps its history and earlier quotes.

A product’s tax is a suggestion. Cord calculates taxes per quote line, so the same product can be taxed in one sale and exempt in another. When you add the product, the line comes in with the rate you assigned to it (or with your default rate if you didn’t assign one, or if that rate is no longer in your catalog under Settings › Quotes › Taxes, where each rate is named after your country’s tax), and you can change it on the line. Changing the product’s rate later doesn’t alter quotes or invoices already sent. See Products and pricing.

SAT keys (Mexico)

If your business invoices in Mexico, each product has an E-invoicing (SAT, Mexico) section:

  • SAT product or service key: type a word (“software”, “consulting”) and pick the key from the SAT catalog, or type its 8 digits.
  • SAT unit key: derived from the product’s unit (“hour” → HUR, “month” → MON, “kg” → KGM). Type another one only if your accountant asks for a different key.

Invoices read these keys when stamping. A product without a product key, or a free line, is stamped with the generic keys 01010101 and H87. More in Invoicing.

Edit product modal scrolled to E-invoicing (SAT, Mexico): "software" is typed in SAT product or service key and the list shows three keys from the SAT catalog, whose descriptions are in Spanish: 81111500 Ingeniería de software o hardware; 81111800 Servicios de sistemas y administración de componentes de sistemas; 80101500 Servicios de consultoría de negocios y administración corporativa. Above, the IVA 8% región fronteriza tax; below, Volume pricing.

Volume pricing

Use it for wholesale: the price drops automatically when the line quantity reaches a tier.

  1. In the product form, open Volume pricing and select Add volume tier.
  2. For each tier, enter From (the minimum quantity) and the unit price from that quantity on.
  3. Save the product.

For example, with a list price of 100.00 MXN and tiers From 500 → 90.00 MXN and From 2,000 → 75.00 MXN: a 300-piece line uses 100.00 MXN, an 800-piece line uses 90.00 MXN and a 2,500-piece line uses 75.00 MXN. Below the first tier the list price applies. The client-level discount is calculated on the price of the applicable tier.

Kits

A kit groups items you usually quote together, for example an installation package, so you can insert them into a quote with one click.

  1. Open Products › Kits and select + New kit.
  2. Enter the Name and, optionally, a description.
  3. Under Kit line items, search catalog products by name or SKU, or add a + Free-form line (for example, labor) with its description. Adjust each line’s quantity.
  4. Optional: turn on Sell the kit at a fixed price to offer a bundle. Cord shows the sum of list prices and how much the bundle saves (or how much more it costs).
  5. Select Save kit.
New kit modal with three catalog lines (cement, rebar and block) plus one free-form labor line, and the fixed bundle price of $18,500.00 MXN enabled: the list total is $20,272.00 MXN, so the kit saves $1,772.00 MXN (9%).

When quoting, use + Insert kit in the editor. The lines come in as normal quote lines: you can edit or remove them like any other, and changing the kit later does not modify quotes already created. With a bundle price, Cord spreads that total across the catalog lines; free lines do not take part. Only active kits appear when inserting.

Import products from CSV

  1. In Products, select Import CSV. If you don’t know the format yet, use ↓ Download sample template.
  2. File. Drag your file or click to choose it. Only .csv is accepted.
  3. Columns. Match your file’s columns to Cord’s fields. Cord suggests the matching based on the header names. Uncheck The first row is headers if your file has none.
  4. Review. You see how many products will be imported, how many rows are skipped for having no name, and a preview of the first rows. Decide whether to Update existing products with the same SKU.
  5. Select Import to load the catalog.

Columns that are imported

Cord field Required How it is read
Name Yes Rows without a name are skipped.
SKU / Code No Stored in uppercase. It is the key for updating existing products.
Unit No If empty, pieza (piece) is used.
List price No Use a period as the decimal separator, for example 1234.50. A negative price is stored as 0.
Active No 0, no, false, inactive, off or empty mark it inactive; any other value, active. Without the column, all are active.

Not imported: cost, description and volume pricing. Enter them in each product’s form after importing.

Update existing products

With Update existing products with the same SKU on (the default), a row whose SKU already exists in your catalog updates that product instead of creating a new one. Rows without a SKU always create a new product.

When updating, Cord rewrites name, unit, price and status with what the file contains. If you don’t map the price column, updated products end up with price 0; if you don’t map the unit, they end up as pieza. To change prices safely, first export your catalog from Settings › Advanced › Data & privacy (same format as the import), edit that file and import it again.

Import clients from CSV

The Clients directory has the same three-step assistant: Import CSV, match columns and review. It also offers its own sample template.

Cord field Required How it is read
Company Yes Rows without a company are skipped.
Contact, Email, Phone No Text as provided.
Tax ID (RFC, NIF, EIN…) No Validated with the country’s rules and stored normalized. A row whose ID fails is skipped and the screen tells you which one and why; the rest is imported. An ID the client already had unchanged isn’t validated again.
Payment terms No A code (net45) is taken as is. A number is read as the closest offered term without going over: “45 days” becomes Net 45, “40 days” Net 30, and “5” Due on receipt. Without a number, “credit”, “net”, or “plazo” become Net 30. Empty or any other text, Due on receipt.
Credit limit No A number without a currency symbol; empty means no limit.

With Update existing clients (same tax ID or name) on, a row that matches by tax ID or, if it has none, by company name, updates that client. As with products, empty or unmapped fields replace what the client already had.

Limits by plan

Plan Products Clients Kits
Free 50 50 No separate cap
Starter 500 500 No separate cap
Professional, Scale and Developer No cap No cap No separate cap

Each import accepts up to 2,000 rows; if your file is larger, split it. Inactive products also count toward the cap. If you reach the product cap in the middle of an import, what was already imported is kept and Cord tells you how many were created and updated.

The product page

The Products list has quick filters: All, Active, Inactive, With volume pricing, No cost set and Low margin. Opening a product shows its page with closed revenue and units sold, win rate, price realization (minimum, average and maximum charged against list price), list margin versus realized margin, its volume pricing ladder, who buys it most, its latest quotes and which kits include it.

Common problems

“Maximum 2000 rows per import”. Split the file into parts of 2,000 rows or fewer.

“Choose which column has the product name”. Map the Name field before continuing.

“The file is empty or couldn’t be read”. Save it as CSV with UTF-8 encoding. An Excel file (.xlsx) is not accepted by this assistant: export it as CSV.

Prices were imported wrong. Check the decimal separator: use a period and don’t use periods as thousands separators.

I hit my plan’s cap. Deactivate or delete products you no longer use, or change plans in Your subscription.

Does your catalog live in another system? You can keep it in sync from Shopify or with the Products API. To build the catalog from your price list in Excel, PDF or a photo, use Set up with AI.