Almost nobody starts from nothing. There is usually a list already: a spreadsheet somebody built after the last big stocktake, a tab in the accounts workbook, a printout in the site office that got typed up once and never quite maintained. It is out of date and it is not much use on a wet Tuesday when you need to know where the transformer went — but it took real hours to make.
The thing that stops most businesses moving to a proper system is not the software. It is the sinking feeling that comes with the phrase start by adding your assets. Four hundred items, typed in by hand, by somebody who already has a full day’s work. That job gets postponed once, then indefinitely, and the spreadsheet limps on for another year.
So don’t type it in. Import it.
Your spreadsheet, not ours
Asset Giant reads a CSV file — the format every version of Excel, Google Sheets and Numbers can save in a couple of clicks. You upload it as it is. There is no prescribed layout to conform to and no reformatting to do first.
Instead, you get a matching screen: one row per column in your file, showing its heading and a couple of your own real values, with a dropdown to say what it should become. Asset Giant fills in most of it for you — it recognises its own export headings exactly, and it knows the alternatives people actually use:
- Make or Brand becomes Manufacturer.
- Cost, Price or Value becomes Purchase Price.
- Qty becomes Quantity, Job becomes Project, Assigned To becomes the team member.
- Serial, SN and Model No all land where you would expect.
Anything it doesn’t recognise is left blank for you to set, deliberately — a confident wrong guess is a great deal worse than an honest gap.
And there is exactly one required column: the asset name. If all you have is a list of 300 item names in a single column, that will import perfectly, and you can enrich the records later at your own pace. Everything else — categories, locations, serial numbers, purchase prices, warranty dates, your own custom fields — is optional detail you bring across if you happen to have it.
[ Illustration Required: Screenshot of the column-matching step: the user's own spreadsheet headings on the left with example values, and a dropdown against each one choosing the Asset Giant field it maps to. ]
You see exactly what will happen, before it happens
This is the part that matters, and it is the part most import tools get wrong. Before a single record is written, Asset Giant checks every row in the file and shows you the outcome: how many assets it will create, how many it will update, how many it will skip, and how many it cannot import at all.
For anything it cannot import, it tells you precisely why, in plain language, with the fix — “Category “Fixings” does not exist yet. Create it first, then re-import.” Not an error code. Not a row number you have to go and count to.
Nothing has been saved at this stage. You can go back and change the matching, close the tab and walk away, or fix your spreadsheet and start again. It costs you nothing to look first, and it means an import is never a leap of faith.
When you do commit, the assets are created in small batches with a progress bar, so a large file neither times out nor bogs the system down for everyone else on site.
Nothing gets invented behind your back
An import will only ever put your assets into things that already exist in your account — your asset types, your categories, your manufacturers, your locations, your projects, your clients. It will never quietly create one from a spelling in your file.
That restraint is on purpose. A system that creates whatever it reads turns a single typo into a permanent duplicate, and inside a month you have “Makita”, “makita ” and “MAKITA” as three separate brands with no easy way back. Five minutes setting up your categories first is worth a year of not tidying them up afterwards, and the import screen opens with a short checklist so you know exactly what those five minutes involve.
For the same reason, Asset IDs are always generated by Asset Giant, never taken from the file — they follow the format you set, so your register stays consistent from the first imported item to the thousandth. If your spreadsheet has its own reference or tag column, you can still bring it in and use it to recognise items you already have.
Import it again next month, safely
An import is not a one-off migration you do once and dread repeating. Because you can nominate a matching key — usually the serial number — Asset Giant can tell the difference between a row it has seen before and a genuinely new item.
That makes several everyday jobs painless:
- Topping up. A supplier sends a delivery note as a spreadsheet. Import it; the items you already own are skipped, the new ones are added.
- Bulk-updating. Someone has been maintaining purchase prices or warranty dates in Excel. Import with “update the existing asset” and the values are brought across without creating anything.
- Finishing an interrupted job. If your plan filled up part-way through a large import, upgrade and import the same file again — everything already in is recognised and skipped, and only the remainder goes in.
And if an import turns out to be the wrong one, you can undo it for seven days. Assets it created are removed, assets it changed are put back as they were, and anything a colleague has edited since is deliberately left alone and named in the result — so an undo can never quietly discard someone else’s work.
Best Practice: export what you have, look at the columns, and import a ten-row test file first. Confirm it lands where you expect, then import the whole thing with confidence. It takes two extra minutes and removes all the guesswork.
Or hand it to us
On any paid plan, importing your spreadsheet is included in what you already pay. Send us the file and we will match it up, import it and tell you when it is done. No charge, no upsell, no ticket queue — we would simply rather you were up and running than stuck at the starting line.
On the Free Forever plan, if your spreadsheet is being awkward, email it over anyway and we will happily talk you through it.
For the full step-by-step guide, see [Link: importing-your-existing-spreadsheet]. And because what goes in must be able to come out again, it is worth reading Exporting a List to PDF or CSV too — your data is yours, in both directions.