A web-based UI or CSV data loader is not the solution to managing your Salesforce price books and product records

It can be mind-numbing to add or update multiple products or Price Books in the Salesforce UI. Many Salesforce Admins will turn to the Data Loader which, for upserts, requires that users first download their data, make changes, and subsequently upsert it monitoring for error files to download. Don’t rely on Data loader when there are better alternatives.

A faster, better alternative

At CloudExtend, we built a better solution, one that allows you to interactively work with your Salesforce data directly in Excel on a Mac or PC, even validating your picklist values prior to upload. Our application, CloudExtend Excel for Salesforce, supports most all native and custom Salesforce objects and installs in seconds from the Microsoft Office store.

CloudExtend Excel for Salesforce can help you quickly add and edit your Products as well as associate them with one or more Price Books eliminating the requirement for using Data Loader or the Salesforce UI thus saving unnecessary steps.

In the video below Chris Corcoran, General Manager of CloudExtend, shows how you can create and update products directly in Excel and associate them with multiple Salesforce Price Books.

The video walks through the following steps.

Adding new product records to your price book

1. Load your product template (see fields in the template below) and include the Price Book Entry fields (if you don’t plan to add your Products to a Price Book you can leave out the Price Book Entry fields or simply not enter values in them).
2. Enter the Product details such as Description, Name, Code, etc.
3. If you don’t want to associate the Product to a Price Book you can skip to step 6
4. Select the appropriate Price Book to relate the Products with (it must be related to the Standard Price Book first)
5. Enter the List Price for the Product
6. Update all or selected rows to create the Products in Salesforce and, if indicated, also associate them with a Price Book.

New product ready to be uploaded and added to Standard Price Book

New product successfully added (note the Salesforce ID’s returned)

To add the same product to another Price Book remove the Salesforce ID that was generated from the previous step for the Price Book Entry (Price Book Entries: Price Book Entry ID and select a new Price Book.

Associating existing products with a Salesforce price book

Companies will often use multiple Price Books. With CloudExtend Excel for Salesforce, it’s easy to associate your existing products (or subset) with more than one Price Book.

1. Bring the desired products into the template above with a Data Filter, ie load the template, filter the data to retrieve just the products you want. Be sure that you’ve added the criteria that ensures you will only pull Product from one Price Book otherwise you will see multiple Price Book entries.
2. Remove the Salesforce ID in Price Book Entries: Price Book Entry ID. If the price will be changing update that as well.
3. Select the Price Book you want to add the Products to (Price Book Entries: Price Book) and add/update the price. Leave the Price Book Entries: Price Book Entry ID and Price Book Entries: Product ID empty.
4. Use the Update function to add the Products to the related Price Book. After the update the ID fields will be populated you’ll be alerted that the Product has been successfully added to the Price Book.

Edit product details (and optionally price)

With CloudExtend Excel for Salesforce, you can edit product details such as name and description. If desired you can even edit the product pricing details for one or more Price Books.

If you only need to edit product fields (ie you do not need to modify pricing) you can use option 1 or option 2.

Edit product details only

1. Create a template based on the PRODUCT object and the desired fields. It is not necessary to add any related objects.
   Sample CESF Product template based off of PRODUCT object

Edit product details as well as pricing information

1. Load the same template as ‘Adding New Products’ (above)
2. Download your products (using a data filter if necessary to limit them to a specific set of products and Price Book)
3. Make changes to the pricing (and, if desired, product details)
4. Update all or selected rows to push the changes back to Salesforce