Bring a bill of materials in from your CAD tool and turn it into a project PartsBox can price, source, and build. Import from KiCad, Altium, EAGLE, or any tool that exports CSV or TSV — which in practice means every CAD tool — into a new project or an existing one.
PartsBox parses the file and shows the first rows, so you set the separator and the character encoding until the preview reads correctly. Then map each column to a BOM field: the quantity, the part, the reference designators, the footprint, a do-not-populate flag. A Guess button makes a best-effort match from the column headings; review it before you commit — the imported BOM appears below the mapping, so you see the result first. Save the mapping as a preset, and the next import from the same tool is one click.
PartsBox matches each line against your existing parts in three passes, in order: by ID Anything™ code, by CAD key, and by name or MPN. An exact key never guesses wrong, which is why the KiCad and Altium integrations put the ID Anything™ code into the exported BOM for you.
PartsBox never creates parts on its own during an import, because two parts can share a name and a wrong match is expensive to undo. Instead, it highlights every line it cannot match. You create the missing part or pick the right one by hand, or select a set of lines and retry them together once the parts exist.
A value, a tolerance, a placement note, or an internal alternate number comes across as a custom field on the entry — indexed for search, shown in tables, exported to CSV and PDF, and printed on labels. A BOM line does not have to be a part, either: a row can be PCB fabrication, assembly, testing, or packaging, taking offers exactly as a part does, so the project covers the whole job and not only the components.
When an entry carries reference designators, the quantity has to match their count: a quantity of 2 with designators C1 and C2 is correct, and a quantity of 2 with only C1 is flagged. A fractional quantity matched to a part counted in whole pieces is probably an error too — PartsBox warns and offers to round it, or to unmatch the part. A part measured by length, weight, or volume accepts fractional quantities in its own unit, so 2.5 meters of wire imports as exactly that.
The result is one BOM that matches your inventory, ready to price from live distributor offers, turn into a purchase list, or build.
BOM import is in every plan, including the free Maker plan. Pricing the BOM, with price breaks and multiple currencies, starts on the Essentials plan.