The Scenario
You are a product manager at a consumer goods company. The new catalogue goes live next Monday. You have 30 discontinued SKUs in an Excel workbook — item IDs in column A of the Discontinue tab — and they all need to be marked inactive in Zoho Inventory before the sync runs.
If even one stays active, it will show up in the next purchase order suggestion and confuse the procurement team.
The bad version of this weekend:
- You open Zoho Inventory and search for the first item ID
- You open the item, find the "Mark as Inactive" button, click it, confirm
- You search for the next item ID
- By item eight you are searching for an ID that returns no results because you transposed two digits
- By item eighteen you accidentally deactivated an item that was not on the list
- Monday morning, three items are still active and the catalogue sync is already running.
The fast version is one prompt on Sunday evening.
The Easy Way: One Prompt in SheetXAI
SheetXAI is an AI agent inside your Excel workbook that reads the item IDs in the Discontinue tab and calls Zoho Inventory's item deactivation endpoint for each one, then writes the result back into the workbook.
Open the SheetXAI sidebar and type:
Mark each Zoho Inventory item whose ID is listed in column A of the Discontinue tab as inactive and write DEACTIVATED or ERROR into column B. If an item is already inactive, write "ALREADY INACTIVE" into column B.
SheetXAI reads all 30 IDs, calls Zoho Inventory for each, and writes the status back. The entire run takes under a minute.
What You Get
- 30 Zoho Inventory items marked inactive
- Column B shows DEACTIVATED for each successfully deactivated item, ERROR for any that failed, and "ALREADY INACTIVE" for items that were already off
- Order history preserved — marking an item inactive does not delete its historical transaction data
You have a written record of what was deactivated. If the procurement team questions why a SKU disappeared, column B shows the exact status for each item ID.
What If the Data Is Not Quite Ready
Discontinuation lists assembled by product teams are not always clean. SheetXAI handles the edge cases before deactivating anything.
When the workbook has item IDs mixed with item SKUs
Some rows in column A have the Zoho Inventory item ID (numeric), others have the human-readable SKU. You need to deactivate both.
For each value in column A of the Discontinue tab, determine whether it looks like a Zoho Inventory item ID (numeric) or a SKU (alphanumeric). Look up SKUs to get their item IDs. Then mark each resolved item as inactive and write DEACTIVATED or ERROR into column B.
When you want to verify the item has no open sales orders before deactivating
Deactivating an item that still appears on a pending order will cause confusion in the warehouse.
For each item ID in column A of the Discontinue tab, first check whether the item appears on any open Zoho Inventory sales order. If it does, write "HAS OPEN ORDERS — skipping" into column B. If it does not, mark the item as inactive and write DEACTIVATED or ERROR into column B.
When the list has duplicates from different team members
The product team compiled the Discontinue tab from three category managers and the same item ID appears in multiple rows.
Before deactivating, deduplicate the item IDs in column A of the Discontinue tab. For duplicate rows, keep the first occurrence and write "DUPLICATE — SKIPPED" into column B for all later occurrences. Then deactivate each unique item ID and write DEACTIVATED or ERROR into column B.
When you also need to remove discontinued items from Zoho Inventory price lists
Your pricing team maintains a saved price list in Zoho Inventory, and discontinued items should be removed at the same time as they are deactivated.
For each item ID in column A of the Discontinue tab, mark the item as inactive in Zoho Inventory. Then remove the item from the "Standard Retail Price List." Write DEACTIVATED into column B if both steps succeed, ITEM DEACTIVATED / PRICELIST FAILED into column B if the deactivation succeeded but the price list removal failed, and ERROR if the deactivation itself failed.
The pattern: one prompt, one run, the catalogue is clean before Monday's sync.
Try It
Get the 7-day free trial of SheetXAI and open any discontinuation list workbook with Zoho Inventory item IDs, then ask it to mark them inactive. The Zoho Inventory integration is included in every plan. For the upstream step, see how to bulk-create items from a catalogue workbook or the Zoho Inventory in Excel overview.