The Scenario
You are an operations manager at a company migrating away from a legacy system. The cutover is next Tuesday. You have 60 vendor contacts in an Excel workbook — vendor name in column A of the Contacts tab, email in column B, phone in column C, and payment terms in column D.
Every one of them needs to be live in Zoho Inventory Contacts before the first purchase orders go out next week.
The bad version of this week:
- You open Zoho Inventory's new contact screen
- You type the first vendor name, paste the email, enter the phone, set the payment terms
- You save and open the next contact
- By contact twelve you have misspelled two email addresses and set the wrong payment terms on contact seven
- By contact thirty you have a headache and still have thirty more to go
- The cutover is Tuesday and you are barely halfway through on Friday afternoon.
The fast version is one prompt on Monday morning.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that reads the Contacts tab and calls Zoho Inventory's contact creation API for you, writing the returned contact ID back into the workbook.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Create a Zoho Inventory contact for each row in the Contacts tab — contact name from column A, email from column B, phone from column C, and payment terms from column D. Write the returned contact ID into column E. Flag any rows where column A or B is blank in column F.
SheetXAI reads all 60 rows, creates one contact per row, and writes the contact IDs back into column E. The whole run finishes in minutes.
What You Get
- 60 Zoho Inventory vendor contacts created, one per row
- Column E holds the contact ID for each row — useful when you need to reference vendors in purchase orders
- Blank rows flagged in column F so you know which vendors were not created
The contact IDs matter downstream. When purchase orders go out next week, Zoho Inventory uses these contact IDs to link vendors to transactions. Having them in the workbook means no lookup step when you start creating POs.
If payment terms in your workbook use shorthand ("Net30") and Zoho Inventory expects a specific format ("Net 30 Days"), tell SheetXAI to map them before creating contacts. That normalization is part of the prompt.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Legacy system exports are messy by nature. SheetXAI handles cleanup and contact creation together.
When email addresses in the workbook have formatting errors
The export included typos: extra spaces, missing dots in domains, "@" replaced with "(at)."
Before creating contacts, validate and fix the email addresses in column B of the Contacts tab — remove extra spaces, fix "(at)" to "@," and flag any addresses that still look malformed after fixing by writing "INVALID EMAIL" in column F. For all valid rows, create the Zoho Inventory contact and write the contact ID into column E.
When payment terms are inconsistent across the workbook
The legacy system used eight different labels for what Zoho Inventory calls four options.
Before creating contacts, normalize the payment terms in column D of the Contacts tab: map "Net30" and "30 days" to "Net 30 Days," "Net60" and "60 days" to "Net 60 Days," "COD" and "Cash" to "Due on Receipt," and anything else to "Net 30 Days" as a default. Then create the Zoho Inventory contact for each row using the normalized terms.
When some vendors already exist in Zoho Inventory from a previous partial import
You tried this last month and got halfway through. Now the workbook has a mix of vendors that exist and ones that do not.
For each row in the Contacts tab, check whether a Zoho Inventory contact with the same email address in column B already exists. If it does, write the existing contact ID into column E and "ALREADY EXISTS" into column F. If it does not, create the contact and write the new contact ID into column E.
When the workbook also has a notes column with account-specific payment notes from the legacy system
Column E has free-text notes like "always requires PO number on invoice" or "send reminders to AP inbox not main email." You want these preserved in the Zoho Inventory contact record.
For each row in the Contacts tab, create a Zoho Inventory contact using name from column A, email from column B, phone from column C, and payment terms from column D. Add the text from column E as a note on the contact record. Write the returned contact ID into column F and flag any failures in column G.
The pattern: clean the data and create the contacts in one pass. The cutover deadline does not care about your legacy export format.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any vendor list workbook, then ask it to push all rows into Zoho Inventory as contacts. The Zoho Inventory integration is included in every plan. For the downstream step, see how to bulk-create purchase orders from a restocking workbook or the Zoho Inventory in Excel overview.