What makes a great Product Code in Infusion?

These tips will help keep your data clean, your imports smooth, and your website syncs stress‑free, whether you're using Desktop or Online.

We see many datasets with Product Code formats, some great some not so great!  So,what makes a good Product Code in Infusion?

Most of these tips relate to working with your products in Excel for importing and exporting and/or syncing your products through to a website - so they relate to both Desktop & Online

1. Auto Numbering - If you want hassle‑free codes, auto‑numbering is your friend. Start at 10000 and you’ll enjoy tidy, evenly formatted 5‑digit codes that sort beautifully—no surprises, no sorting weirdness.
2. An Alpha character helps Excel recognise that the code is not a number.   Many supplier SKUs will be numbers only.   Consider prefixing their code with an abbreviation eg:  MX621551 instead of 621551
3. Hyphens and numbers together can convince Excel you're entering a date. We've seen innocent codes like 05-25 mysteriously morph into MAY-25.  Avoid the chaos by using an alpha character somewhere — it stops Excel from getting creative.
4. Excel has improved, yes… but leading zeroes? They still love to disappear. Instead of:   061352 Go for:  P061352
5. Brackets, quotation marks, commas, ampersands… While Infusion might tolerate them, your website or spreadsheets may not.  For smooth sailing across all systems:
   Stick with hyphens or underscores - Avoid other punctuation.
6. Leading zeroes - Despite Excel finally offering improvements and leaving these alone, they're still one to avoid if possible!    Instead of 061352 try something like P061352.
7. Long numeric codes often get auto‑formatted into scientific notation or rounded  in Excel.  Once again, adding one trusty alpha character keeps everything behaving nicely.
8. Spaces won't usually break things… but they can cause hiccups with imports, websites, or search tools.  It’s better practice to keep your codes compact and continuous

The great news is that Product Codes are easily editable in Infusion Online - one of our partners has also created a bulk product code swap tool to help if you really want to tidy things up!  Contact Infusion Support who can put you in touch.