I’m trying to figure out the best design/diagram/suggestion for a workflow, I guess with an AI agent, to handle the following tasks.
The Context
Business : Sells thousands of spare parts online via Shopify
Suppliers: Dozens
ERP : Uses Zoho Inventory to manage stock, pricing, and updates
Current Challenge
Supplier price updates are sent as Excel files with multiple tabs (one per product category)
Each tab contains (at minimum) two key columns:
General Item No
Purchase price
Manual entry of these values into Zoho Inventory is slow and error-prone
Target Workflow
User triggers the workflow manually (e.g., by clicking an icon)
A chat-like interface welcomes the user and prompts for Excel upload
→ (Note: This should be handled outside of n8n, since the client doesn’t have access to n8n UI. Use a simple web interface, Telegram bot, or similar.)
Once uploaded:
Read all Excel tabs
Extract only General Item No and Purchase price columns from each tab
Create a new summary tab consolidating these two columns from all other tabs
Perform data validation:
Highlight rows with issues in orange (e.g., empty values, wrong formats)
Generate a “Data to be Checked” report with:
Tab name
General Item No
Issue description
Present summary back to user via chat
Wait for user to correct the Excel file , then type update
Reload the file and reprocess clean data
Call Zoho Inventory API to:
Update Purchase Price for each item
Update Selling Price (basic formula)
Notify user with: “Your Zoho database has been successfully updated.”
Additional Notes
Zoho API access is already authorized
File upload location is TBD: open to recommendations between local processing vs. using Google Drive, etc.
Chat interface should be external to n8n (not the default n8n frontend, probably Telegram)
Hello @Michael_Doukhan,
i don’t think it’s right to ask the community to do a workflow for you.
We are people who like to get our hands dirty, make mistakes, ask questions and ask for help.
If you need a hand in building a flow it would be wise to offer a job and compensation for this.
If, on the other hand, you have already built a flow on this idea of yours and you have a technical and specific question we are here to listen and help you.
Actually, I just hoped to have someone give his opinion of the general design of such workflow before I start working on it, not to make it of course. But never mind, thanks anyway.
you could you an ai agent, which calls subworkflows or just process through, would normally work quite well with vector store, but using an ai agent for this, it’s probably better to just run a workflow, which syns the data, but if you talking about enriching data by using ai, on like sales recommendation, product description, tags, u could use an aiagent to choose what it thinks is best
Depending on how many items, but google drive is quite, if u get into the 1000s+ maybe merge to an actual db, like ncbd, airtable.
Manual mapping first, and not relying on AI agents, will guarantee the results you need if it’s just data mapping.
The main thing is to ensure you have a method on linking the items, I use to put there product code, as my barcode or SKU etc, easily knowing what item is what.
We’ve created a new category for help with designing workflows, and I’ve moved your question there: Help me Build my Workflow. Find out how this category works by reading this topic.
Additional Notes