PRACTICAL EXCEL WORKFLOW

Turn an ERP open-jobs export into an updated Excel production board

Classify matched, new, closed and unsafe-to-match jobs before updating the board your shop already uses.

An open-jobs export is a current snapshot, not a change report. To update a board safely, compare today and yesterday as two sets instead of pasting one over the other.

Safe method

Normalize only declared types such as ISO dates and numeric quantities.
Build exact keys on both files and count their occurrences.
Matched once on each side: update only ERP-owned fields.
Today only: add to New Jobs with blank user fields.
Yesterday only: move to Closed Jobs. Missing or repeated keys go to review.

Worked example

J-201 exists in both files and is updated. J-202 exists only today and becomes NEW. J-199 exists only yesterday and becomes CLOSED. Two J-205 rows are quarantined as DUPLICATE.

Checks that prevent plausible-looking mistakes

A row missing today may be closed, filtered out, or exported incorrectly—keep it visible for review.
A blank job ID is not a match candidate.
A duplicate key is a data-quality exception, not permission to choose the first row.

The objective is not to maximize automatic matches. It is to make every accepted match deterministic and route uncertainty to a short manual review.

What the review should show

Exact key and ERP versus user column ownership mapping — Declare the match key and which source owns every column.

Production board refresh change report and exception counts — Review changes and exceptions before exporting the updated workbook.

Free alternatives

Power Query can implement this method with exact joins and anti-joins. It is the best free option when someone in the shop can build and maintain the query. The local beta packages the same safety decisions into one narrow workflow; it does not claim to support every ERP or custom workbook.

Further reading: source 1 · source 2

Related production-board guides

Try the synthetic sample locally

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