Importing items from vendor catalogs to Lightspeed Retail can be an excellent time-saver. Rather than entering all of an item’s details, you can search catalogs and import items. By creating a purchase order you can select multiple items, even entire pages of results, and import them swiftly into your local inventory, with or without quantities on hand.

To import catalog items to your inventory

1. From the main menu, click Inventory > New Purchase Order.

2. Select the vendor your inventory is going to be imported from and save your changes.

3. In the Search field type something specific that you're looking for, or something generic, such as wheel. If you want to search only the catalogs for the vendor, clear the Search All Catalogs checkbox.

   NOTE: You can import items from any catalog into the same purchase order, but they won't have a vendor ID, and will be marked as received from the vendor attached to the PO.

4. In the search results, select the checkboxes for all of the items you want to import, and click Import/Add Selected.

   NOTE: Your selections aren't saved if you move to the next page, so if you want more results to choose from change the amount of results per page.

5. If all you want is to import the items you chose to your local inventory, you can leave this purchase order or change its status to Finished and you’ll see those items within your local inventory with 0 quantity. If you’re importing these items as a way of adding inventory, change the quantities to the amounts on hand for each item, and change the status to Check-In, click Mark All Items Received and Add Items to Inventory, and change the status to Finished.

NOTE: If you finished the PO and added inventory, this will be reflected in your reports. If you need to avoid a double entry in your chart of accounts in QuickBooks you may not want to include POs in your next export.