How to automate supplier price list imports without breaking your product catalog

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A software developer has detailed a practical pipeline for automating price list ingestion at a distribution company, where suppliers send Excel or PDF files every few weeks in inconsistent formats. The solution uses deterministic table extraction tools like pdfplumber and openpyxl, with an LLM applied only once per file to map column headers rather than parsing every row. Unmatched product codes are held in a review queue instead of auto-created, preventing duplicate entries from accumulating in the master catalog, and human resolutions are stored to shrink the queue over time. Hard-coded validations catch issues such as price swings above 40%, zero or non-numeric values, duplicate codes, and unexpectedly low row counts that could otherwise wipe active listings. The author notes that edge cases like decimal separator conflicts, inconsistent VAT inclusion, and scanned PDF images require additional handling, but the overall process cuts what was a half-day manual task down to a few minutes plus shrinking review time.

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