Switching from Schoch: which data an electrical contractor takes along — and what it has to re-enter

When you switch from Schoch to elektro.box, you take the article catalogue with you — article numbers, texts, sale and purchase prices, units, ELDAS numbers and hourly rates — and the customer list from a CSV or Excel file. Quotes, invoices and history do not come along: they stay in the old system for as long as you need them, and new documents are written in elektro.box. This article says what exactly is carried over, what you re-enter, and in which order a switch hurts least.

⚠️ What Schoch itself can or cannot do is not stated here: we only make a statement about another vendor when we have read it on that vendor's own page — and for this article that was not the case. It describes only what elektro.box reads in. How to produce the master-data sheet from your Schoch installation is in your Schoch documentation or with Schoch support.

What matters when you change trade software

Trade software for electrical contractors — also called an industry solution or an electrical ERP, see «ERP and CRM for electricians» — has grown over years. Its value to the business lies less in the screen than in the data inside: in every article someone once set up cleanly, in the hourly rates, in the customers and their addresses. A switch is therefore feasible when that data comes along, and expensive when somebody has to retype it.

Four questions decide whether a switch is realistic:

1. Do the articles and prices come along?
2. Do the customers come along?
3. What happens to open quotes and orders?
4. What happens to the Steiger subscription and the NPK data?

What elektro.box reads from a Schoch master-data sheet

In the article catalogue there is an import called «Import from Schoch». It reads a master-data sheet in the old Excel format (.xls, at most 5 MB) and creates your articles in one step. These columns are carried over:

• Artikel-Nr. and Artikel-Text — the number is stripped of spaces and thousands separators («9 277» becomes «9277») so that it matches something later. Multi-line texts become one line, at most 255 characters.
• Festpreis-K — the sale price.
• Einkaufpreis — the purchase price.
• Einheit — the unit; if it is missing, «Stk» (piece) applies.
• Eldas — the ELDAS number, where the sheet carries one.

Whether a row is material, labour or a flat charge depends on very little: if the unit is an hour, it is labour — those are your electricians' hourly rates. If the row otherwise has a purchase price, it is material; everything else becomes a flat charge.

The import deliberately handles three quirks of the sheet:

• Variants. An article can have several variants on following rows. elektro.box keeps one price per article number and therefore takes variant «00»; if there is none, the lowest one present. That matters because some articles — such as named electricians with their hourly rate — exist only in another variant and would otherwise be lost. The import reports how many variants it skipped.
• Articles without a sale price arrive, but as inactive. The number and the text are the laborious part; a line that could be quoted at 0.00 is not worth that. As soon as you enter a price, the article is usable.
• Importing more than once is fine. The import matches by article number: if you correct a price in Excel and upload the sheet again, it updates the article instead of duplicating it.

A sheet without the columns Artikel-Nr., Artikel-Text and VA is refused, and the error message names the columns it found.

What does not come along

• Quotes, invoices, Rapporte and history. The master-data sheet contains articles, not documents. Anyone who needs to look up an invoice from last year does so in the old system for as long as the business needs it — statutory retention periods apply to business records anyway, and your accountant, not a piece of software, decides how long.
• Short codes (Kürzel). The sheet carries them, but the import does not read them into the catalogue. If you work with short codes, you set them up again.
• Steiger data. See the next section.

Taking customers across

The customer list does not travel via the article sheet but via «Import customers»: a CSV or Excel (XLSX) file of at most 5 MB and 5,000 customers, for example from your previous trade software. The first row is read as the header. You map your file's columns to the fields — customer number, company or name, address, phone, email, contact person, property — and elektro.box proposes the mapping from the column names; you save it as a template. At least one column must hold the name or the company.

Whether and in what form customers can be exported from Schoch as CSV or Excel is something to check there; elektro.box reads what is in such a file.

Steiger and NPK: the catalogue is not copied

Anyone who buys calculation data from Steiger holds a licence for it. elektro.box does not copy that data into your article catalogue: Steiger positions are licensed centrally and searched from the catalogue when you write a quote. For a business without an enabled Steiger catalogue, the «Steiger» tab says accordingly that none is available. Changing software therefore leaves your Steiger contract alone — but it has to be enabled for elektro.box, and you settle that before the switch, not after. On the role of the NPK: «NPK costing for the electrical contractor».

elektro.box reads a planner's tender — a Steiger file (.DAT) or an SIA 451 file — line by line without AI; only a photo or a PDF goes to the AI. That concerns the tender that comes to you, not your own old quotes.

The switch in five steps

1. Pick a cut-off date. From that day, new quotes and invoices are written only in elektro.box. A quiet start of the month beats the middle of a billing run.
2. Bring the articles across. Upload the master-data sheet, read the summary — created, updated, inactive, skipped — and go through the inactive articles.
3. Check the hourly rates. They are the part of the sheet with the greatest effect on every quote; check them before the first one.
4. Bring the customers across. Upload the CSV or Excel file, map the columns, save the template.
5. Decide on open quotes and orders. What is still running at the cut-off date, you finish in the old system; what runs beyond it, you create anew in elektro.box. A short list before the cut-off date saves the searching afterwards.

Where elektro.box connects to accounting and materials is on Integrations; what the product does otherwise is on Features. How to judge trade software in the first place is summed up in «Trade software for the electrical contractor».

Common questions

Can I switch from Schoch to other electrical software and keep my articles? With elektro.box, yes: the import «Import from Schoch» reads a master-data sheet in .xls format and creates articles, prices, units, ELDAS numbers and hourly rates. What your Schoch installation can output, you clarify there.

Do I lose my old quotes and invoices when I switch? They do not come along, but they are not lost: they stay in the old system. New documents are written in elektro.box; how long you keep the old system for reference depends on your retention duties.

What happens to articles that have no sale price? They are imported but marked inactive, so that nobody quotes at 0.00 by accident. As soon as you enter a price, they are usable.

Do I have to cancel my Steiger subscription? No. Steiger data stays with your licence and is not copied into the article catalogue; the catalogue has to be enabled for your business in elektro.box.

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Sources: The statements about elektro.box come from the product's own scope — article-catalogue import, customer import and the Steiger connection — and from the pages Features and Integrations, as of 3 October 2026. Schoch Informatik's pages could not be retrieved while writing; this article therefore makes no statement about their software, prices or export options. «Schoch» and «Steiger» are the names of the respective vendors.