Backend developer

Accept customer spreadsheets in your SaaS through an API

Send each customer upload to the XlsConverter REST API with a mapping template for your schema. The workbook is parsed, columns are matched and cleaned, and your service receives the result as JSON through an HMAC signed webhook, so you never maintain a spreadsheet parser.

Your customers want to import contacts, products or transactions from spreadsheets. They upload XLSX from Excel, XLS from older systems, CSV with semicolons, ODS and sometimes Apple Numbers files, with headers in their own words and dates in their own locale.

Building and maintaining parsers for all of that is not your product. Edge cases such as Excel date serials, encodings, merged headers, password protected files and 300 MB uploads keep reaching the support queue, and each one costs engineering time.

The workflow

1. 1UploadYour backend sends the customer file to the API, or passes a short lived URL, together with the ID of a mapping template for your import schema.
2. 2Parse and matchThe workbook is read whatever its format, the header row is detected and columns are matched to your schema, with AI normalization suggesting matches for unfamiliar headers.
3. 3Clean and typeValues are trimmed, dates converted to ISO 8601, numbers normalized and empty cells written as null, following the rules in the template.
4. 4Webhook deliveryWhen the job finishes, your endpoint receives a webhook signed with HMAC, with the JSON result or a link to it, plus a list of rows that failed validation.
5. 5Show resultsYour app imports the clean rows and shows the customer any rejected rows with the reason, so they can fix and re-upload.

An example calculation

Example calculation, not a customer result. If spreadsheet import issues take a developer 5 hours per week in fixes and support, at a loaded cost of 90 USD per hour that is 450 USD per week, or about 23,400 USD per year. The API plan billed yearly costs 2,388 USD.