Moving from Excel and Paper Books to gamitrack Without Losing a Week

A distribution business usually runs on a mix of things: an Excel sheet for stock, a handwritten khata for dealer balances, a WhatsApp group for orders, and a few people's memories. Moving to a single system sounds like a mountain of data entry. In practice most of the work is deciding what to carry over and cleaning it, and the data entry itself is a few days if you are organised. This guide gives you the order of work, based on the way gamitrack is structured.

Principle: migrate what you operate on

Ask of every sheet: "Will anyone look at this next month to do their job?" If yes, it moves. If it is history, keep it as a file. Operating data in a distribution business is only four things:

1. Products with units and prices,
2. Parties, meaning dealers, distributors and shops,
3. Stock on hand by branch and batch,
4. Balances, what each party owes you or you owe them.

Everything else, such as last year's sales by month, can stay in Excel until you want to compare.

Step 1: Choose the cut-over date

Pick the first day of a month if you can, or the first day of a week. Everything before the date lives in the old system, and everything from that date lives in gamitrack. The cleaner the date, the easier the first month-end close.

Announce it. "From the 1st, no order is valid unless it is in the app" is a sentence that saves a lot of confusion.

Step 2: Clean the product list

Open your Excel stock sheet and fix it before you load anything:

• One name per product. "Masala 100g", "100 gm masala" and "Masala 100 gram" are one SKU.
• One unit per SKU and a clear pack size.
• Record the weight in kilograms if you track kg sold, because orders and the daily summaries use weights.
• Decide categories, for example by brand or product family.
• Mark which products charge VAT. VAT is applied only on taxable lines.

Then create Products and SKUs in gamitrack. Do it once, carefully. Changing a SKU later is harder than getting it right now.

Step 3: Build price lists

Your Excel probably has a rate column that nobody fully trusts. Replace it with price lists in gamitrack: a default price list, a list per party type (dealer, retailer) and overrides for special accounts. Details are in setting different prices for dealers and retailers.

Step 4: Clean the party list

This is the longest step. Gather every list: officers' contact lists, the accountant's ledger, the WhatsApp contacts. Combine them in one sheet with columns for name, type, owner, phone, area, and where possible a location.

Rules for cleaning:

• Merge duplicates. Search by phone number first, because names vary but numbers rarely do.
• Classify. Dealer, retailer, institution. The type controls which price list applies.
• Add location. Parties carry geolocation, which powers geofenced visits. If you do not know exact coordinates, add them when an officer first visits the shop. New outlets added in the field go through approval.
• Assign areas. Decide which region or route each party belongs to.

Enter parties in gamitrack. If you have hundreds, enter dealers and active shops first. Inactive shops can wait.

Step 5: Load opening stock

Count the stock physically on the cut-over day, or as close as you can. For each branch and SKU, record the quantity. Stock in gamitrack is an append-only history of movements, so opening stock is entered as movements, and from then on every sale, return or transfer is a new movement. If the product has batches or expiry dates, create the batches and record stock against them. Why bother? Because it unlocks first-expiry-first-out discipline, covered in batch and expiry control.

Set reorder levels while you are there so that low-stock alerts work from day one.

Step 6: Carry over balances

For each dealer and shop with an outstanding balance, agree the number with them. If your book and their book disagree, resolve it now or note the dispute separately. Do not load a disputed number and hope. Check the Help centre for the current way to bring opening balances into the ledger rather than improvising.

Step 7: Run in parallel, briefly

For one or two weeks, let a single person watch both systems. They compare the day's orders in the app with the old sheet. Differences tell you who is still working the old way. Stop the parallel run on a fixed date, because everyone's real behaviour only changes once the old route is closed.

Step 8: Retire the old files properly

Make the old Excel files read-only, put the date in the filename and tell staff not to edit them. Keep a backup. If a dispute needs old data, you still have it, but nobody is tempted to update the wrong file.

Migration checklist

Item	Done when
Cut-over date announced	Everyone can state it
Products and SKUs cleaned and created	One record per SKU
Price lists set	Dealer, retailer and special rates
Parties merged and typed	No duplicate phone numbers
Opening stock recorded per branch	Matches physical count
Balances agreed	Signed off by accountant
Staff trained	Pilot officers took real orders
Old files frozen	Read-only with date

Common mistakes

• Over-importing. Loading five years of history delays go-live and adds noise.
• Skipping the physical count. An Excel sheet that "should" match stock usually does not.
• No owner. Assign one person to be responsible for data quality for the first month.
• Training after launch. Train first; see onboarding a 20-person sales team in one week for a schedule.

Next

When the data is in, your first real test is the first month-end, described in the month-end closing checklist. To compare plans, visit the pricing page, and for screen-by-screen instructions use the Help centre.