Bulk onboarding with Basanti

Let Basanti read your invoices, rate cards, spreadsheets and recipe sheets, and draft the records for you to review and save.

Setting up a new business means entering a lot of masters — items, vendors, supplier rates, opening stock, recipes. Basanti does the typing for you: upload the documents you already have, and she reads them, drafts the records, and shows you everything for review before anything is saved.

You’ll find her on Settings → Import & Onboarding — the page has two tabs, Spreadsheet and Ask Basanti. Basanti is available to owners and managers (anyone who can add items). New to the terms here? See the Glossary.

What she can read

• Master list (items) — your item spreadsheet (CSV or XLSX).
• Vendor invoices — photos or PDFs → items, vendors, and the rates you paid.
• Rate cards / vendor catalogs — supplier price lists.
• Recipe sheets — read from the Recipe library’s own Ask Basanti (see below).

She also picks up each item’s shelf life and any printed expiry dates, so your perishables start with honest expiry tracking.

Upload and read

1. Open Settings → Import & Onboarding and choose the Ask Basanti tab, then press Let’s get started.
2. Pick what the files are first — the These files are selector (Master list, Vendor catalog, Vendor invoice or Rate card). The drop zone unlocks once you’ve chosen, so an invoice is never read as a master list.
3. Drop your files, or click to browse — CSV, XLSX, PDF or photos, up to 15 MB each. You can add several at once.
4. Press Read files. Keep the tab open while she works — a banner shows progress (“3/5 files”) and warns you not to refresh or close.

Each file in the list shows its status: waiting, reading, read, or failed. You can remove a file any time it isn’t mid-read.

Review what she found

Once reading finishes, the review surface opens under Here’s what I found. The rule is simple: everything saves unless you skip it — your job is just to fix or skip the exceptions.

• Records are grouped in tabs by type — Items, Vendors, Rates, Recipes — with a count on each.
• The Needs a look filter collapses a big import to the handful of rows that actually need you; there’s a search box too.
• Every field is editable inline before saving. Basanti flags which records already exist in your masters (a re-upload updates rather than duplicates) and which are new.

Price conflicts. When two documents disagree on a price — or a new invoice price differs from the one already on file — a Which price is right? card lists the candidates with their source (“from invoice” or “on file”) and document date. Pick one with a tap. You can’t save while required conflicts are unresolved; the save button tells you how many are left.

Vendors. Vendors found in your documents are auto-created as draft vendors — add their contact details later under Vendors. Each item row in review has a Vendor panel: use Add a vendor (or Edit) to attach a vendor and price to the item. Several vendors? Separate them with a semicolon — prices line up in the same order — and the first one becomes the item’s preferred supplier. A PO can’t be sent to a draft vendor until you add a phone number or email.

Save to masters

Press Save N to masters. Keep the tab open while it runs. When it finishes you get a result banner — created, updated, skipped — with a per-type breakdown and a list of anything that couldn’t save, each linking straight to its row.

Saving is safe to repeat: running it again updates the same records instead of creating duplicates, and rows that failed stay in the list so you can fix and save just those. Your session also survives a reload — if you come back mid-review, you land back where you were with your edits intact.

Credits and the allowance meter

AI reading spends your business’s monthly allowance. The meter at the top — “X% of this month’s allowance used” — is shared by every AI surface, so bulk onboarding and recipe reading draw from the same pot.

• Spreadsheets are free. A clean CSV/XLSX is read directly — no AI, no credits. Only photos, PDFs and recipe reading spend the allowance.
• If credits run out mid-session, nothing fails. Files already read are safe and stay in review; the remaining ones simply wait — the banner says, for example, “3 of 5 files read and saved; the remaining 2 are waiting for credits”. Credits reset on the 1st; reach out if you need more sooner.
• Saving reviewed work never uses credits — you can always commit what’s already been read.

Recipe sheets

Recipes have their own Basanti flow, in the Recipe library: press Ask Basanti there to read a whole recipe sheet — pasted text or an uploaded Excel, CSV or text file. She separates each recipe, matches every ingredient line to your live inventory, and costs them.

• Upload in batches of roughly 40–50 recipes. That’s what a person can honestly review in one sitting, and pasted text is capped at 50,000 characters per go. Separate recipes with a blank line or a “Recipe 1 / 2 / 3” heading.
• Units are read and editable. Each ingredient line shows the unit Basanti read; where the item allows a choice you can change it right in the review card, and the line re-prices live. If a unit had to be converted or read in the base unit, a note says exactly what happened.
• Unmatched lines block saving — match each one to an inventory item or remove it, then press Create N recipes.
• Nothing needs re-reading. Recipes are saved one by one with a progress bar. If a few fail partway, the saved ones leave the list and the failed cards stay behind with a banner — press Create again to retry just those. If credits run out partway through a sheet, the recipes already read are ready to save (saving is free); read the rest of the sheet again after credits reset.

The spreadsheet route

The Spreadsheet tab on the same page takes a plain CSV — no AI involved.

1. Download the template and fill it in. Its columns include Item Name, Department, Category, Unit, Cost, Quantity (opening stock), Par, GST %, Vendor and Vendor Price — plus the expiry columns: Shelf Life (days it typically keeps; blank means non-perishable) and Expiry Date (for this opening stock; blank defaults to import date + shelf life).
2. Upload it back. The file is validated first — anything auto-corrected, imported with gaps, or skipped is listed for you to check before you commit.
3. Press Import. Large files import in chunks with a live progress bar (“1,240 / 5,000”) — keep the tab open until the result banner appears with the created/updated counts.

If the columns don’t match the template, the file is rejected up front as “incorrect format” — download the template again rather than renaming headers.