Maintaining accurate serial number records for received purchase orders (POs) is essential for precise inventory tracking and product traceability. If you've been tracking serial numbers outside of Katana—such as in spreadsheets or other systems—you can bulk-import this data into Katana for fully received POs and outsourced purchase orders (OPOs).
Prerequisites
Plan requirement: Ensure you're on a Standard plan or higher to access serial number tracking features.
Serial number tracking: Serial number tracking must be enabled for the products associated with the POs you intend to update.
Steps to import serial numbers
Download the import template:
Navigate to Settings → Data import.
Under Update purchase orders with serial numbers, click Download data.
Understand the template structure:
The downloaded file will list received POs that:
Have items with serial numbers already assigned.
Have items with serial number tracking enabled but no serial numbers specified (these will have empty Serial number fields).
Populate the template:
Each row corresponds to a single unit in a PO. For example, a PO with a quantity of 30 will have 30 rows.
Required Fields:
Katana ID: Unique identifier for each PO row. This field is used to match serial numbers to existing PO rows in Katana. If this field is empty or doesn't match an existing PO row, the row will be skipped.
Serial number: Enter the serial number for each unit. Ensure each serial number is unique for the item variant. If the Serial number field is empty, the row will be skipped during import.
Reference Fields (not updated during import):
PO #: The received PO number.
Received date: The date when the item was received.
Variant code: The SKU of the item variant.
Variant name: The name of the item variant.
Example:
Import the completed template:
Return to Settings → Data import.
Under Update purchase orders with serial numbers, click Upload data.
Select and upload your completed spreadsheet.
Review import results:
Katana will validate the file to ensure it meets import requirements.
If successful, Katana will indicate how many rows were imported.
Once completed, the POs will be updated with the provided serial numbers.
Important notes
Each serial number must be unique for its item variant. If a duplicate serial number is detected, the row will be skipped.
If multiple rows for an item variant have the same serial number, only the last row will be imported.
Ensure that the Katana ID field is correctly populated to match existing PO rows; otherwise, those rows will be skipped.
The PO #, Received date, Variant code, and Variant name fields are for reference only and will not be updated during the import process.
Using the Update manufacturing orders with the serial numbers template, you can bulk update the serial numbers on completed manufacturing orders.
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