Migrating fromSpreadsheets to PalmFlow

Introduction

If you track your reselling business in Google Sheets or Excel, you're in the biggest group of sellers there is — and you're already most of the way through this migration, because your sheet is the export. The work here isn't getting data out; it's getting the columns named in a way PalmFlow recognizes. This guide walks through exactly that.

Jump ahead

• Background
• Concepts
• Before you start
• Moving your data
• What transfers
• Troubleshooting
• Pricing
• Conclusion

Background

• A spreadsheet is a genuinely good first system. It's free, it's yours, it does exactly what you tell it, and plenty of sellers run serious volume on one for years.
• What breaks isn't the math — it's the upkeep. Every sale gets typed twice, fees get looked up by hand, a formula quietly stops covering a column you added, and nobody notices until the numbers matter.
• PalmFlow launched in 2026. It's a reseller operations platform — inventory, orders, cost basis, and P&L on server-side eBay and Shopify sync. The pitch against a spreadsheet is narrow and specific: the rows fill themselves in.

Concepts

There's no product to translate here, so this maps habits rather than features.

Before you start

Almost all of the effort in this migration is here, in the sheet, before you import anything. Half an hour spent tidying saves an afternoon of corrections.

• One header row, at the very top. No title rows above it, no merged cells, no logo in row 1.
• One row per item. If a row represents five of something, that's a quantity column, not five items squeezed into one line.
• Money as plain numbers — 1234.50, not $1,234.50. Currency symbols and thousands separators are the most common cause of a mangled import.
• One consistent date format down each date column.
• No totals row at the bottom, and no blank spacer rows in the middle. Both import as items.
• Separate tabs for inventory, sales, and expenses if you keep them together — they go to three different importers.

Moving your data

Five steps, and the first one is most of the work. PalmFlow matches columns by their header name, so renaming a handful of headers is what turns your sheet into a clean import.

1. 1

   Rename your columns to what PalmFlow reads

   You don't have to reorder anything or delete columns you don't need — anything unrecognized is simply ignored, and the preview tells you what was skipped. You just need the important ones named correctly.

   1. The item's name: head it name, item name, title, or product.
   2. What you paid: head it cost, cogs, purchase price, or cost of goods.
   3. What you're asking: head it listing price, list price, or current price.
   4. What it sold for: head it sold for, sale price, or sold price.
   5. Your reference: head it sku or custom label. How many: quantity or qty.
   6. Where it's stored: location, bin, shelf, or warehouse — PalmFlow creates each location as it imports.
   7. When it sold: sale date, date sold, or sold date. Where it sold: platform or marketplace.

   Watch out for a column headed plainly price — PalmFlow reads that as the sale price, not what you paid. If your sheet uses price to mean cost, rename it to cost before you import. This is the single most common spreadsheet migration mistake.

2. 2

   Save each tab as its own CSV

   CSV is one tab, not one workbook, so a three-tab sheet becomes three files.

   1. In Google Sheets, open the tab you want, then File → Download → Comma Separated Values (.csv). It exports the tab you're looking at.
   2. In Excel, open the tab, then File → Save As and choose CSV UTF-8. Accept the warning that only the active sheet is saved — that's the behavior you want.
   3. Repeat for each tab: inventory, sales, expenses.
   4. Open each CSV in a text editor if you want to be certain — you should see one header line and then your rows.

   If your sheet has accented characters or non-English text, CSV UTF-8 is the option that keeps them intact. The plain CSV option can mangle them.

3. 3

   Connect eBay to PalmFlow

   Do this before importing. It's the step that ends the typing — and it also means the importer has your real listings to match your rows against.

   1. In PalmFlow, open Settings → Integrations.
   2. Find eBay and click Connect, then authorize on eBay's own sign-in page.
   3. Choose the eBay marketplace you actually sell on.
   4. Let the first sync finish — active listings arrive as items with titles, prices, and quantities, and orders start syncing with real fees attached.
   5. Connect Shopify the same way if you run a store.

   The eBay connection reaches back roughly two years for order history, so a good part of your sales tab may already be in PalmFlow before you import it. Duplicate order numbers are skipped, so the overlap is harmless.

4. 4

   Import inventory, then sales, then expenses

   In that order, always — imported sales link back to items that already exist. Every importer shows you its reading of the file before writing a single row.

   1. Go to Inventory → Import CSV for the inventory file.
   2. Read the preview carefully the first time: how many new items, how many sold rows become orders, how many duplicates get skipped, which columns matched, which were ignored.
   3. Check the sample rows underneath — they show your first few rows exactly as parsed, so a mangled price is visible before it's real.
   4. Confirm, then repeat with Orders → Import CSV and Expenses → Import CSV.
   5. Sales and expense files cap at 2,000 rows each. Split by year if your sheet goes back further.
5. 5

   Check the numbers against your own formulas

   You have something most migrating sellers don't: a sheet you built and trust completely. Use it.

   1. Open Reports and set the range to a period your sheet already totals.
   2. Compare revenue, cost of goods, and profit against your formulas.
   3. Where they differ, check individual rows before assuming the import is wrong — a spreadsheet that's been hand-maintained for years usually has a few surprises in it.
   4. Undo any import in one click from the result message, fix the sheet, and rerun.

   Keep the spreadsheet. Don't delete it, don't overwrite it — park a copy somewhere safe. It costs nothing and it's your fallback for the first month.

What transfers

What comes with you, and how.

Keep a copy of the original sheet. It costs nothing, and it's a useful fallback for the first month.

Troubleshooting

The questions that actually come up partway through a move from Spreadsheets.

Pricing

A spreadsheet costs nothing, which is a real advantage and worth naming plainly. What you're weighing is your time against a subscription.

PalmFlow annual billing drops Pro to $15.99 and Ultra to $31.99.

PalmFlow exports everything back to CSV whenever you want it, so moving to a spreadsheet later is a download rather than a rebuild.

Conclusion

Your sheet is already the export, so this migration is really a rename-and-save exercise: get the headers right, download one CSV per tab, connect eBay, and import in order. Reconcile against your own formulas — you'll trust nothing else as much — and keep the file. Then stop typing in sales.

An honest caveat: if you sell a handful of items a month, a spreadsheet is genuinely fine and you should keep it. The point where it stops being fine is specific — when maintaining it takes longer than the selling, when you can't answer what a particular item actually made without reading four columns, or when someone else needs to touch it.