Exporting a usable item list from 1C before a barcode count

Most barcode counts that stall do so before anyone picks up a scanner. The item list that came out of 1C has no barcodes, or the barcodes have been turned into scientific notation by Excel, or half the products appear twice under different names. Ten minutes spent on a proper export saves hours on the warehouse floor. This is what to put in it and what to check before you hand it over.

What the list must contain

The count team needs enough information to recognise every product and compare it with the books. A useful export has one row per item and these columns:

• item code as it appears in 1C
• full product name, with colour and size in a separate column if the system holds them
• barcode or barcodes, one per cell, or one row per barcode
• unit of measure, and the number of pieces per carton if cartons are used
• book quantity per warehouse, taken at a stated date and hour
• cost or price, with the currency written next to it
• product group or category
• an active or inactive flag

If you keep supplier article numbers or marketplace codes in a reference field, add them too. They will later become the backbone of the code mapping table.

Take the quantities at a fixed moment

A list without a time stamp is nearly useless. If you export balances on Monday morning and count on Thursday, every receipt and dispatch in between will show up as a gap. Export the balances as of the cut-off hour, or at least export the movements after it, and write the date and hour in the file name, for example stock_2025-10-15_18-00.xlsx.

Formatting traps in Excel

Saving a report into Excel is where many lists get damaged. Watch for these:

1. Long barcodes shown as 4.6E+12. Excel treats a long number as a number and displays it in scientific notation, and digits beyond the fifteenth are lost. Format the barcode column as text before pasting, or export it as text.
2. Lost leading zeros. A code such as 00415 becomes 415, and no longer matches the label.
3. Report headers, subtotals and group rows left inside the data. A table you can filter must have one header row and nothing but items below it.
4. Look-alike letters. A Latin A and a Cyrillic А look identical but are different characters. A lookup on one will not find the other.
5. Spaces at the end of a code, which make two identical codes unequal.
6. Merged cells and hidden rows or columns, which drop out or shift when the table is filtered or loaded into another program.

Check the export before you use it

Three quick checks catch most problems:

• Compare the number of rows with the number of items in 1C and the sum of quantities with the total in the stock balance report.
• Sort by barcode and look for blanks and for the same barcode against two items.
• Pick ten items at random and compare them with the system screen, character by character.

For example, a warehouse has 3,200 items in the system and the export has 3,187 rows. The total of the quantity column is 47,950 against 48,600 in the balance report. The difference of 650 units turns out to belong to 13 items marked inactive that still hold stock. Filtering them out of the export would have hidden 650 units from the count.

When you find problems, do not just fix them quietly in the copy. List them: which items lack barcodes, which are duplicated and which names are ambiguous. Give the list to whoever maintains product data and correct them in 1C too, or the same problems will return in the next export.

Hand over the list with a note

Add a short note to the file: which warehouses are included, the date and hour of the balances, which items are known to have no barcode, and who can answer questions about product names. A list that explains itself saves a round of phone calls on count day.

For InventoryHub, this list is the starting point: we ask for the product and barcode list as a 1C, Excel or ERP export, build the code mapping table from it with your staff, and label what has no code before scanning begins.