Bring supplier stock items and prices into Lentune from PIMS, instead of retyping them or falling back on miscellaneous codes.
How PIMS and Lentune work together
Step one: get the supplier's price file into PIMS
Step two: bring the stock items into Lentune
Step three: keep the prices up to date
Add a single item while you are quoting or ordering
Fixing a batch that has gone wrong
Overview
Your suppliers send you price files, and every one of them arrives in a different shape. Some are tidy spreadsheets, some are exports from a system nobody has looked at in years, and the columns are never in the order you want. Typing all that into Lentune by hand is not realistic, so it is tempting to skip it and sell against a miscellaneous code instead. This article shows you how to get supplier catalogues and prices into Lentune in bulk using PIMS, the Price Information Management System that sits alongside your main Lentune site. You do not need to have used PIMS before, and you do not need to be technical.
| Note: This article is for businesses using PIMS. If you are not sure whether you have it, ask us at support@lentune.com and we can check for you. |
How PIMS and Lentune work together
You have two systems, and understanding the split makes everything else easier.
PIMS is your price file library. It holds supplier catalogues: their codes, descriptions, brands, buy prices and price breaks. PIMS does not receive anything on its own — somebody has to put a price file into it. That is done by creating a batch, which is one supplier's price list with a date the prices take effect from. Either you build and load the batch yourself, or you give the supplier a PIMS login so they can load their own and you simply approve it. Both are covered in step one.
Lentune is your trading system. It holds your stock items, your selling prices, your purchase orders and your customers.
PIMS can hold a supplier's entire catalogue of fifty thousand items without any of them becoming stock items in Lentune until you say so. There are two separate jobs here, and it helps to keep them apart in your head:
- Bringing an item in. This creates the stock item in Lentune. You do it yourself, either in bulk from the Update prices from PIMS screen or one at a time from the Search PIMS window while you are quoting. Step two and the single-item section below cover both.
- Keeping its price current. Once an item exists in Lentune, you do not have to keep re-importing it. Whenever a price file is approved in PIMS, you run the update in Lentune and the new prices flow through to every item you have brought in. Step three explains how.
| Important: That price update only touches stock items that already exist in Lentune. It never creates new ones. So if you load a supplier's price file into PIMS and no new codes appear in Lentune, that is working correctly — you still need to bring the items in, which is step two. |
Before you start
Three things need to be right before any of this will work. They are one-off checks rather than something you do every time, but if one of them is wrong the symptoms are confusing rather than obvious.
- Each supplier in PIMS is linked to the matching payable account in Lentune. That link is what lets Lentune recognise which supplier a price belongs to. It is set on the payable account, in the Details box, in the field called Pims (external) National supplier. Each PIMS supplier can only be linked to one payable account — if you try to link one that is already in use, Lentune will not let you save and will tell you which account is already using it. If you get that message, the supplier is already set up somewhere else, so find that account rather than creating a second one. If you are adding a supplier to PIMS for the first time, ask us to set the link up for you and confirm it is right.
- Your Stock Manager is pointed at PIMS. Under Settings > Stock Manager there is a PIMS settings box. There is no single on or off switch — the connection works when the details in that box are complete. They are PIMS Api Url, three Oauth fields, a client secret, and PIMS Tenant Id, which usually holds the name of your PIMS site. We fill these in when PIMS is switched on for you and they should not need touching. If something looks wrong, tell us rather than editing it, because a change here stops every price update.
- "Make new stock when importing" is ticked. This one is a tick box in the same PIMS settings box, and it is the setting that allows Lentune to create a real stock item. If it is switched off, the import in step two will appear to do nothing and you will keep getting miscellaneous codes. See Why you might still see miscellaneous codes.
It is also worth knowing about buying and selling units. Where you buy an item in one pack size and sell it in another, Lentune needs both numbers so it can convert the supplier's price to your selling unit. That is a one-off job per item, on the Supplier Codes tab of the stock item, covered in Update Payable Contracts from your Price Information Management System (PIMS). If it is not set, prices still come through, they just are not converted.
Step one: get the supplier's price file into PIMS
Who does this: you or your supplier
Price files do not arrive in PIMS by themselves. Somebody has to create a batch and load a spreadsheet into it. There are two ways that happens.
Your supplier loads their own. This is the option worth pushing for, because it takes all of the spreadsheet work off you. Your PIMS administrator sets the supplier up under Administration > Supplier Accounts, then creates a login for their contact under Administration > Users and gives that login permission to submit batches but not to approve them. The supplier then signs in to your PIMS site, builds their file, and submits it. It waits for you to approve. Send them Supplier Guide to Create & Upload a Price File to PIMS, which is written for them.
You load it yourself. Everything below covers this. You still end up approving it either way, so the approval part at the end applies whoever built the file.
Decide first: prices, or stock details?
PIMS treats these as two different kinds of batch, and it matters because it changes what your spreadsheet is allowed to contain.
- A pricing batch is the normal case: new or changed prices, with or without new items. Every row needs a price.
- A stock update only batch changes the descriptive information on items that are already in PIMS — descriptions, brands, categories, barcodes, data sheet links and so on — and changes no prices at all. You mark it as such with the Stock Update Only tick box when you create the batch.
Do not mix them. If you tick Stock Update Only and your spreadsheet still has a selling price, nett buy price, discount percent or price break in it, every one of those rows will fail with a message such as Selling price is not allowed (this is a stock-update-only batch). Stock Update Only batches also require every item to exist in PIMS already, so any row for an item PIMS has never seen fails with Stock does not exist. If you are changing prices at all, leave the box unticked and use a normal pricing batch.
Create the batch
- Sign in to PIMS and go to Supplier Stock Import > Pending Stock Batches.
- Click Create New.
- Leave the Code as the timestamp the system suggests, or add something meaningful to it. It has to be unique.
- Check the Supplier Account is the supplier this price file belongs to.
- Set the Effective Date to the date the new prices should start. It must be a future date, and suppliers are normally asked for 30 days or more ahead. This date matters more than it looks — see the note below.
- Set the Expiry Date. Leave it blank if the prices run until the supplier next changes them, which is the usual case. Put a date in only if the pricing is a limited-time deal that should stop applying. If you do set one, put a reminder in your calendar for a few days before it, so you can get the replacement pricing in before the current prices run out.
- Tick Stock Update Only (tick if there are no pricing changes to be made, only stock changes) if this batch carries no prices. Otherwise leave it unticked.
- Click Save. Then click Actions and choose either Download Import Template for a blank template, or Export existing stock to get a spreadsheet of everything already held for that supplier, already in the right layout. For anything other than a brand new range, exporting is the easier starting point because you are editing real data rather than building from scratch.
| Tip: Whichever option you choose, click Actions > Export existing stock and keep that file, even if you are starting from the blank template. It is a snapshot of the supplier's prices as they are right now, and it is what you would use to put things back if the new file turns out to be wrong. It takes a few seconds and it is the difference between a five minute fix and a very long afternoon. |
| Important: A batch cannot be approved before its effective date. If you date a file for the first of next month, it sits in PIMS until then and you have to come back on or after that date to approve it. Nothing reaches Lentune until you do. Put a reminder in your calendar for the effective date, otherwise a perfectly good price file will sit there unapproved and your buy prices will quietly stay out of date. |
Fill in the spreadsheet
The template has three rows at the top. Row 1 is the column heading, row 2 explains what the column is for with an example, and row 3 tells you whether the column is mandatory, recommended or optional. Read row 2 as you go — it answers most questions about what belongs where.
You can overwrite the examples in rows 2 and 3 (or paste underneath and delete those two rows later) but make sure you do not rename the headings and do not delete the heading row in Row 1.
Then copy your supplier's data into the matching columns. If their spreadsheet has its columns in a different order, either reorder theirs to match or copy the columns across one at a time. That is tedious the first time and there is no way around it, but you only work out the mapping once. Keep your working copy, and next time you paste the new numbers into the same spreadsheet.
Only four columns are always mandatory:
| Column | What goes in it |
| Supplier Stock Code | The supplier's own code for the item. Up to 70 characters. This is the field everything else is matched on, so it has to be right |
| Description | The item description |
| Selling Price | The trade price, greater than zero |
| Nett Buy Price | What you actually pay, greater than zero |
Several more are marked mandatory if applicable, which means fill them in only if they apply to that item: Product Rebate Percent, Supplier Pack Size Options, and the nine price break pairs towards the right of the sheet. Each price break needs both a minimum order quantity and a nett buy price — a price without a quantity is rejected.
Barcode, Brand, Supplier Category, Supplier Sub Category, Link To Sdoc, Link To Data Sheet and Unit Of Measure Buy are marked recommended. They are worth the effort — they are what make the item searchable and useful to your counter staff later. Everything else is optional.
A few rules that catch people out: supplier stock code, supplier category, supplier sub category and pack size options are limited to 70 characters, while most other text fields allow 255. Rebate percentages have to be between 0 and 100. Discount percent has to be under 100. Pack size options are whole numbers separated by spaces, like 12 24 48. Multiple barcodes are separated by commas.
Load it, submit it and approve it
- Take a copy of what is there now first. On the batch, click Actions > Export existing stock and save that file somewhere safe. It is your before picture. If the new file turns out to be wrong, this is what you use to put things back.
- Double click your batch and click Import.
- Select your file, or drag it onto the file field, and click UPLOAD.
- Check what appears. The supplier, batch code and effective date show at the top, with the stock items from your file listed underneath.
- Click Issues to see anything wrong with the data. Fix your spreadsheet, import it again, then click Re-evaluate. Repeat until it is clean.
- Click Submit.
- On or after the effective date, someone with approval permission opens the batch and approves it. Until that happens the prices exist only in PIMS and Lentune knows nothing about them.
PIMS separates problems into two kinds, which is why some things stop you submitting and others only stop you approving. Submission errors are problems with the data you supplied — a missing supplier stock code, a missing description, a price of zero, a price break with no quantity. Approval errors are problems with how the item fits into your PIMS setup — an item with no stock group or discount group assigned, an unrecognised attribute, or a barcode already used by a different item. You cannot approve a batch while any item in it is in error.
PIMS can also flag unusually large price movements at submission, comparing each nett buy price against the previous one and warning when the difference exceeds a threshold set in your PIMS settings. That is a useful safety net against a supplier's typo, and it is the main opportunity to catch a bad price before it goes anywhere near Lentune.
Some of these can be waived deliberately. In the batch, Rules lets you add exceptions such as ignoring invalid attributes, ignoring duplicate barcodes, or ignoring the price change warning, so that one recurring quirk in a supplier's file does not mean editing hundreds of rows every time. Rules are covered in Wholesaler Guide to Approve a Pending Batch to PIMS. Ask us if you are not sure whether a rule is the right answer.
Who is allowed to approve
Approving is a separate permission from submitting, on purpose, so that the person who supplies a price file is not the person who accepts it. Suppliers are normally given submit permission only. Your own staff who accept price files are given approve permission as well, and the batch screen shows them the approval options that a submit-only user does not see.
Permissions are managed by your PIMS administrator under Administration > Users and Administration > Security Groups. It is worth having more than one person who can approve, so a price file does not sit waiting because somebody is on leave. If you are not sure who your approvers are, or you need somebody added, ask us and we can sort it out.
Step two: bring the stock items into Lentune
This is the step that stops the miscellaneous codes, and it is the one most people miss. You are picking the items you want out of PIMS and creating them as real stock items in Lentune.
The point is that you choose. A supplier's price file might hold tens of thousands of items, and you almost certainly sell a few hundred of them. Bringing the whole catalogue across would fill your stock file with items nobody will ever quote, make your stock searches harder to use for the people at the counter, and give you thousands of records to maintain for no benefit. So bring in the lines you stock or sell regularly, and leave the rest sitting in PIMS. They are not lost — they stay available in the price file, ready to be pulled in the moment somebody actually needs one, either here or from the Search PIMS window. Your stock file then grows to match what you really sell.
Go to the Stock menu and under Monthly tasks choose Update prices from PIMS. Despite the name, this screen is also how you bring new items in.
- In PIMS Supplier, choose the supplier whose items you want.
- Click the advanced search button on the right of the search row to open the extra options.
- Tick Non-existing stock only. This is the important one. It tells the search to show you only the items that are in the supplier's PIMS price file and do not yet exist in Lentune.
- Optionally type something into Keyword to narrow it down. Each word you type has to either start the item's code or appear somewhere in its description, so a supplier's whole catalogue can be cut down to just the range you are interested in.
- Click Search. The button then tells you how many items were found.
- Tick the Selected box on each row you want. Take your time here — this is your chance to bring in the two hundred items you actually sell rather than the whole catalogue.
- Click More, then Import selected stock items.
- A confirmation window appears with a For Stock tick box. Tick it for items you will carry on the shelf, which creates them as normally stocked and orderable by counter staff. Leave it unticked for items you only ever buy in for a specific customer order. Then click Ok.
Each item is created as a proper stock item, linked to that supplier with the supplier's own code recorded against it, and its pricing is pulled straight from PIMS at the same time. The search then re-runs, so anything you have just brought in disappears from the list. Whatever is left is what you have not brought in yet. If you want to see the items you already hold for that supplier instead, untick Non-existing stock only and search again — that shows you the other side of the picture.
| Tip: If you click Import selected stock items and the rows are still sitting there after the search refreshes, the Make new stock when importing setting is almost certainly switched off. Nothing is broken and nothing is damaged, but Lentune is not allowed to create the stock item. See Before you start. |
This is the recommended way to add stock from a supplier you have a price file for. Because the item comes across from PIMS, the supplier code, description, brand, unit, manufacturer marking and pricing all arrive together and correctly linked, which is exactly what makes the ongoing price updates in step three work.
Step three: keep the prices up to date
Once items exist in Lentune, you never have to re-import them. You just need to tell Lentune to go and collect what has changed in PIMS.
Update prices from PIMS after you approve a batch
This is the habit to get into. As soon as you have approved a price file in PIMS, go back in to Lentune, then go to Stock > Monthly tasks > Update prices from PIMS, look up the supplier, and run the update or pull in new stock. Lentune collects everything that has changed in PIMS since the last run and applies it to the matching stock items.
Doing it yourself, straight after approving, is worth the extra step. You know exactly when prices changed, you are there to look at the result while the batch is fresh in your mind, and nothing moves on your system at a time you were not expecting.
It can take a while on a large price file. Lentune works through the items in blocks, so leave the screen open until it has finished rather than closing the tab or refreshing the page. If it does get interrupted, nothing is damaged — the items it had already got through are saved, and you can search again and update whatever is left.
Lentune can also run this automatically on a schedule, usually overnight, so that approved price files flow through without anyone touching it. Some sites work that way. If you would like yours set up like that, talk to us — but for most people, running it deliberately after each approval gives you more control and makes problems much easier to spot.
What the scheduled task does and does not do
If you have the scheduled task running overnight, it looks for anything that has been approved in PIMS since it last ran and applies it. It does not ask for confirmation, and the restriction percentages described below apply only to the Update prices from PIMS screen — they have no effect on the scheduled task.
That means your real control point is in PIMS, not in Lentune. Nothing reaches Lentune until a batch has been approved, and a batch cannot be approved before its effective date, so approval is the moment to be sure the prices are right. The price change warning in PIMS is there to help you spot a bad one at that point.
Whichever way the update runs, items it cannot deal with are skipped rather than reported. If an item in the price file has no matching stock item in Lentune it is passed over, because the update never creates stock on its own. If the pricing on an item is incomplete it is left alone. Neither shows up as an error anywhere, so if a price you expected has not changed, the way to investigate is the search described next, which tells you item by item what matched and what did not.
Checking prices before you apply them yourself
Sometimes you want to look at what a supplier has changed and apply it deliberately, item by item, rather than letting a whole file through. To do that, use Update prices from PIMS again, this time with Non-existing stock only left unticked so it shows the items you already have.
Restrict Update If Less Percent and Restrict Update If More Percent are your safety limits, and both are required on this search. They are easier to understand as maximum allowed movements:
- Restrict Update If Less Percent is how far a price is allowed to fall. Enter 20 and anything that has dropped by more than 20% is flagged and skipped. A 15% drop still goes through; a 25% drop does not.
- Restrict Update If More Percent is how far a price is allowed to rise. Enter 20 and anything that has gone up by more than 20% is flagged and skipped.
Anything outside your limits appears in the Error / warning column as a price too high or too low percentage change, and is left out when you run the update, so a supplier's decimal point in the wrong place cannot quietly reprice your catalogue. Setting both to 100 effectively lets everything through, which is fine when you already trust the file. If you need a limit above 100, tick Allow greater than 100% first.
Click Search, and the grid shows the current selling price, the new buy price, the change percent and the new selling price side by side. From there:
- More > Remove same priced items clears out everything that has not actually changed, so you are only looking at real movement.
- Tick the rows you are happy with and click Update. If you tick nothing, it will offer to update everything in the grid and ask you to confirm first.
- Double clicking a row opens that stock item so you can look at it properly without leaving the screen.
What arrives, and when
For each item, the update sets up a payable contract. That is the record of what you pay that supplier for that item, and it feeds the buy price onto your purchase orders and the cost behind your margins. The contract carries the effective date from the PIMS batch, and the previous price file contract for that supplier is expired the day before it, so there is never an overlap or any doubt about which price is current.
Where the supplier is the item's preferred supplier and the pricing is standard rather than specific to a branch or a special contract, the item's selling price and standard cost are updated too. Items you have price-matched to another item are left alone, and are marked in the Price-matched column so you can see why.
How Lentune works out which stock item a price belongs to
This is worth knowing because it explains why some prices land and others do not. Lentune tries four things, and capital letters make no difference to any of them:
- the supplier's own code for the item, as recorded against your stock item — this is the main route
- your own stock code, where it is the same as the code in the PIMS price file
- the manufacturer marking, if you have filled that field in
- the supplier's code again, ignoring spaces
The Error / warning column tells you which route was used for each row, for example Found [ABC123] via supplier stock code. If a price is not coming through for an item you know is in the file, the supplier code on the stock item is the first place to look.
The same screen also flags the reverse situation. Where you hold a stock item for that supplier but the code is no longer in their price file, you get a message saying the code does not exist in PIMS for that supplier. That is a useful tidy-up list when a supplier discontinues a range.
Add a single item while you are quoting or ordering
You will not always know in advance what you need. When a customer asks for something you do not stock, you can pull it out of PIMS there and then without stopping what you are doing.
The Search PIMS window is available from the stock search, from the quick price screen, and from sales quotes, sales orders and purchase orders. In it:
- Type what you are looking for into Keywords, and optionally choose a PIMS Supplier to narrow it down.
- Click Search. You will see the code, description, unit, brand, nett buy price, price and manufacturer marking for each match, along with which supplier it came from.
- If the item is one you will start carrying, tick For Stock before you go any further.
- Double click the row. That brings the item into Lentune as a stock item and puts it straight onto the line you were working on.
You can also get to the same search from Stock > PIMS stock details if you just want to look something up.
This is the quickest way to deal with a one-off, and over time it means your stock file grows to match what you actually sell. It relies on the same Make new stock when importing setting as the bulk import — without it, double clicking gives you a miscellaneous line instead of a stock item.
Fixing a batch that has gone wrong
How easy this is depends entirely on how far the batch has got. The earlier you catch it, the less there is to do.
Before you submit. Nothing has gone anywhere. Correct your spreadsheet, import it into the same batch again, and click Re-evaluate. Repeat until the Issues list is clean.
Submitted but not yet approved. Still nothing has reached Lentune, because approval is what releases the prices. Fix and re-import as above, or leave the batch unapproved and load a corrected one.
Already approved. An approved batch cannot be unapproved, so the fix is to correct forward. Create a new batch for the same supplier, put the correct prices in it, and give it an effective date of today so you can approve it straight away. This is where the export you took before you started earns its keep: it holds the prices as they were, so you can rebuild the correct file from it rather than trying to remember. Once the corrective batch is approved, go straight to Stock > Monthly tasks > Update prices from PIMS and run the update, so the right prices are in place immediately.
| Tip: All of this is much easier if you took the export first. Make it a habit — Actions > Export existing stock before every price file you load, and keep the file until the next one has been approved and checked. |
Why you might still see miscellaneous codes
When somebody picks an item out of PIMS, Lentune has a decision to make. It looks for a real stock item matching that supplier's code, and if there is not one, it either creates a proper stock item there and then, or it puts the line on a miscellaneous stock code with the supplier's code and description typed into the description field.
Which of those happens comes down to the Make new stock when importing setting under Settings > Stock Manager, together with the supplier link described in Before you start. If the setting is off, or the supplier's payable account is not linked to the supplier in PIMS, you get the miscellaneous code every time, no matter who is doing the work or how carefully.
| Tip: If your team is using a lot of miscellaneous codes, check that setting before you change anything else about how you work. Miscellaneous codes are not a sign that anyone is cutting corners. They are what the system is designed to fall back on when it is not allowed to create the stock item. |
Miscellaneous lines cost you more than the typing. They carry no history, so you cannot see what you sold or what you paid last time. They do not report properly by product. Margins on them depend on whatever price somebody typed in. And because there is no supplier code recorded, the price update has nothing to attach to, so the price never refreshes. Steps one to three are how you turn them into real stock items.
FAQ
Q: My supplier's price list is a PDF, or the columns are nothing like the template. Can I still use it?
A: Yes. Get it into a spreadsheet first, then move the columns into the PIMS template as described in step one. PIMS only reads its own layout, so the reshaping cannot be avoided, but it is a one-off exercise per supplier. Save your working file and reuse it every time. Better still, ask whether the supplier will load their own files — then it is their job, not yours.
Q: I submitted a batch but the prices have not reached Lentune.
A: Check whether it has been approved. Submitting is not the same as approving, and a batch cannot be approved until its effective date has arrived. If the effective date is next month, the batch will sit there until then.
Q: I loaded a big price file into PIMS and no new stock items appeared in Lentune. What went wrong?
A: Nothing — that is how it is meant to work. PIMS holds the whole catalogue; you choose which items become stock items. Use Update prices from PIMS with Non-existing stock only ticked to see what is available and bring in the ones you want.
Q: Should I use "Import stock items" on the Stock menu instead?
A: Not for anything that is in PIMS. Bringing items across from PIMS records the supplier link, the supplier's code and the pricing all together and correctly, which is what makes the ongoing price updates work. The Import stock items spreadsheet tool is there for data that is not in PIMS at all, or for making bulk changes to items you already have. If you think you need it, talk to us first.
Q: How long before new prices show up in Lentune?
A: As soon as you run Stock > Monthly tasks > Update prices from PIMS after the batch is approved. Nothing happens until then, unless we have set up a scheduled overnight update for you.
Q: Will this overwrite selling prices I have set myself?
A: Only where that supplier is the item's preferred supplier and the pricing is standard rather than branch or contract specific. If you want tighter control, apply prices yourself from Update prices from PIMS using the restrict percent fields, and review the changes before you accept them. There are also per-item locks for the selling price and the description.
Q: The prices came through for most items but not all of them. Why?
A: Almost always the supplier code. Check the code on the stock item against the code in the price file, and check that the item's preferred supplier is that supplier. The Error / warning column on Update prices from PIMS will tell you which items matched and how. See How Lentune works out which stock item a price belongs to.
Q: Can I see what changed after a price update?
A: Yes. Export Stock Pricing Changes Report shows the price changes and can be used to notify affected customers.
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Need more help? We're here! We hope our article was helpful! If you need more info or want to connect, drop us an email at support@lentune.com. Thank you. We love to hear from you! |
Version 3.0 | Last reviewed: August 2026 | Next review: August 2027 | Owner: Lentune Support