How to export your data from any inventory tool

An export is not a backup. A backup is something a vendor keeps; an export is a file you hold, on a disk you own, that still opens when the account does not. The difference matters most on the day you find out you needed one.

This guide is deliberately written without a click path. Menus get redesigned, report names get renamed, and a walkthrough written around one tool's screens is wrong within a year. What does not change is the shape of the data worth saving and the checks that tell you a file is real.

Coming from Stocky? Shopify retires Stocky on August 31, 2026, and there is a version of this page written around exactly that move: the Stocky export walkthrough. Start there if Stocky is the tool you are leaving.

The four shapes worth saving

Whatever your tool calls its reports, almost everything a maker needs falls into four shapes. Go looking for the shape, not the menu item.

1. Purchase history: one row per purchase line. Date, vendor, item, quantity, unit cost, line total. This is the irreplaceable one. It is the only record of what a material actually cost you over time, and it is what lets any new tool rebuild a defensible cost rather than accept a number you typed. Look for report names built on the words purchase, order, received, or bills.
2. Stocktakes and counts. On-hand quantities and how they moved. Useful, but re-countable, so it ranks second. Look for count, stocktake, adjustment, or movement.
3. Per-item cost or valuation. One row per item with a current cost, and sometimes an average. Fine as a starting point, but understand what it is: an answer without its working. If you import only this, the new tool has nothing to recompute from.
4. The product and variant map. Every item, its identifier, and how variants hang off it. This is the least glamorous file and the one that saves the most time later, because it turns "which old name is this?" into a lookup instead of a memory test.

If the tool offers both a purchase history and a cost snapshot, take both. If it offers only the snapshot, take it and keep your invoices, because the invoices are the history.

Ask for CSV, and know why

CSV is plain text. It opens in anything, it will still open in ten years, and no importer has to guess about a formula or a merged cell. A spreadsheet file is fine to receive and worth converting: open it, save a copy as CSV in UTF-8, and keep both.

The encoding is not a detail. It is the step that decides whether your supplier names keep their accents or turn into rubble, and it is invisible until it is permanent. If your tool offers a JSON or XML export instead, take that too. It is harder to read and it usually carries more.

The two-minute check that proves an export is real

Run this on every file, the moment it downloads, while you can still go back and pull it again. An export that came out empty is worse than no export at all, because you will not find out until the door is shut.

• Open it. There should be exactly one header row, and real rows underneath it.
• Find the cost column. Values populated, not all zeros, not blank.
• Find the date column. Dates readable, and spanning the period you expect. A truncated span means the report was filtered.
• Find quantity and unit. Note what "one unit" means in this file. This is the column that decides whether your costs come out right.
• Note the row count. Write it down. You will check it again after the import.
• Note anything you expected and cannot find. That gap is your hand-copy list.

Two minutes of looking is the entire insurance policy on this job. The five ways a technically complete file still produces wrong numbers, and how to catch each one, are in the import guide.

What almost never exports

Every tool has a corner it will not hand over, and you discover which corner on the day you can no longer get in. These are the usual suspects, and all of them are copy-by-hand jobs:

• Suppliers and vendor contacts. The most commonly unexportable record in the category. Copy vendor name, contact, website or login, what you usually buy, typical order size, any price break you have earned, and rough lead time.
• Attachments. Invoice scans, receipt photos, certificates. Almost always left behind by an export.
• Notes and comments on records, which are usually the explanation for a price that otherwise looks like a typo.
• Settings and rules. Reorder points, default units, tax treatments, category structures. They are quick to redo and easy to forget you had.
• Anything only visible on screen. If you rely on a chart or a dashboard number that appears in no report, screenshot it or write it down.

If there is no export button

It happens, and it is not the end of the job. In rough order of effort:

1. Check for an API or a developer page. Many tools have one even when the interface hides it, and a single request can often return everything.
2. Print to PDF and select the text. Ugly, but a long list page copied into a spreadsheet is faster than retyping it.
3. Ask support in writing. Data-portability requests are ordinary and often answered with a file. Ask for CSV and ask for the purchase history specifically.
4. Fall back to your invoices. Work backward from supplier emails and statements for your top ten materials, which is usually most of your cost, and accept that the long tail restarts from today.

Whichever route you take, note the date you pulled the data and what filters were applied. Six months later that note is the difference between a file you trust and a file you re-pull.

Store the files like receipts

Put everything in one folder with an obvious name. Save that folder in two places: your own computer and a cloud drive you control. Add a plain-text note listing each file, which report it came from, and the day you pulled it.

Then leave the originals alone. Every clean-up, split and rename happens on a copy, so there is always an untouched version to return to when an import surprises you. If the file has supplier contacts or anything you would not paste into a public document, keep it out of shared drives and away from group chats.

If your tool is already read-only

Retired tools often keep a read-only window open for a while after they stop working. Treat it as one more chance to pull a file you missed, never as storage. Pull the priority file first, check it, then work down the list, and set a reminder for two weeks before the window ends so the last gaps get filled rather than remembered.

Where Batchnook fits

Nothing above needs an account with us, and that is deliberate. If you do land here, the honest version is a generic column mapper rather than a per-tool preset: paste your CSV or upload the file, match your columns to item, unit, quantity and cost, and read a dry-run preview before anything is written. A bad mapping is undoable for 24 hours. Recipes are built once, here, because retail stock tools do not carry a maker's build.

And the same promise in the other direction, because it is the whole point of this page: you can export everything, materials, products, batches, orders and cost history, as JSON or CSV, free, on every tier, forever. The questions worth asking any tool before you commit, including ours, are in what to look for in a maker costing tool.

FAQ

Get the files out, check every one the moment it downloads, and copy the unexportable corners by hand while the screens still load. Then the move itself is a known quantity: the whole switch in order covers what comes next.