Migrating from Finale Inventory
Bring your catalog (including raw materials), bills of materials (BOMs), and marketplace product lookups (aliases) into Carpe Inventory IQ using the files Finale already exports — no reformatting.
How the guided importer works
The guided importer is a single page with up to four step cards. Which cards you see depends on how your store is set up. Work through them top to bottom the first time — and come back to re-run any single step on its own later. Each step takes a file Finale exports natively, runs one at a time, and shows plain-English progress and a plain-English result, so you always know what happened and what (if anything) to do next.
Where to start
There are two ways to reach the guided importer:
During onboarding — if you choose the “import my catalog” path, you’re taken straight to the guided importer.
Anytime after — go to Settings → Imports → Finale Inventory → Open. You can also get there from the SKUs page: the Importbutton’s dropdown has Import from another system, which opens Settings → Imports.
The four steps
Step 2 is optional, and step 4 is a Shopify-specific step for merchants importing their own catalog.
Products
What you upload here depends on your setup — and many merchants never upload their products at all. If your products already sync from your store (the most common case), you skip the products entirely and only bring in your raw materials and components; your storefront products are already coming in on their own. If instead you're importing your whole catalog, upload the products you sell together with your raw materials and components. Either way, you can upload more than one file, one at a time — a Type column in the file tags each row, so everything lands as the right kind of item.
If your store already syncs your products, you only upload your raw materials and components here — the products you sell are already coming in on their own.
Bills of materials (optional)
Only if you assemble or build products from other items — whether you manufacture from raw materials or combine finished goods into a bundle, set, or kit. Upload Finale's grouped bill-of-materials export, then answer one question: are these built ahead and stocked, or assembled when an order comes in (most common)? That sets the type. If you don't build or bundle anything, skip this step entirely.
Product lookups
Upload Finale's Product Lookups export. In Carpe Inventory IQ these are called aliases — the code each marketplace uses for one of your items. This step creates your marketplace links (your Amazon Seller SKU, your eBay code, and so on, each pointing at the right stocked item), plus your case packs and your Amazon barcodes.
Safe to run again any time. If a marketplace isn't connected yet, the result tells you plainly: connect it and re-run this step to finish. That's the normal way to bind links for a marketplace you connect later.
Attach Shopify IDs
This step is specific to Shopify — it's for merchants importing their own catalog into a connected Shopify store. (If your store already syncs your products in automatically, you won't see this step; those products already carry their Shopify IDs.) It matches your imported catalog to your live Shopify products so orders and syncing line up. Preview first — the preview makes no changes — review the result, then attach.
Things to know
Any step can be re-run on its own
Come back and run any single step again — you don't redo the whole migration. This is how you finish marketplace links after connecting Amazon, eBay, or another marketplace later: connect the marketplace, re-run the Product lookups step, and the links for that marketplace bind.
Case packs become items in your catalog
In Finale, a pack size can be a product lookup with a packing number that never becomes its own item — that's how a big listing count can ride on a small stocked-item count. Carpe Inventory IQ models each pack size as a bill of materials instead, so each pack size stays an item in your catalog, linked to the piece it's made of. You get the same inventory math: a 12-pack sale takes 12 pieces, cost flows from the piece, and the quantity published for the 12-pack is however many the pieces on hand can cover. We keep those pack items off your main SKU list and out of reorder suggestions, so day to day you work in pieces — but the item count underneath is higher than it was in Finale. This is expected, not a problem.
Your Finale account is untouched
Importing here reads your export files; it changes nothing in Finale. You can keep Finale running until you're confident everything came across the way you expect.
Large catalogs are handled
The importer handles large catalogs, and the result flags anything that needs a closer look. If something looks off or keeps repeating, contact support.
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