A line sheet template is three blocks on a page: a header that says who you are and how you trade, a product table with one row per sellable item, and a terms block that answers the questions a buyer would otherwise email you.
Build it once as a spreadsheet you can export, not as a design file you have to rebuild every season. A notebook brand with eleven products should be able to change a price and produce a fresh PDF in ten minutes, and that is almost entirely a question of how the template is built rather than how it looks.
What a template has to give you
Three things, in order of how often they are missed.
Completeness. Every field a buyer needs to build an order without contacting you. If your template has a hole, the hole repeats on every sheet you ever send.
Reusability. New season, new prices, same structure. If updating means moving text boxes around, you will avoid updating, and a stale sheet is worse than a plain one.
One source of truth. The prices on the sheet, the prices on your invoices and the prices in your storefront should come from the same place, because the alternative is discovering a discrepancy during a reorder.
What it does not have to give you is beauty. A plain, legible sheet with every field filled in outperforms a designed one with gaps, every time. The reasoning behind that is in wholesale line sheet.
The header block
Six lines across the top of page one, above anything else.
- Brand name and logo, small.
- The document and the date: "Wholesale line sheet, autumn, effective 1 September".
- Contact: a person's name, an email a human reads, a phone number.
- Opening order minimum and reorder minimum, in dollars.
- Lead time: "ships in 5 to 7 business days" or a delivery window for a season.
- Shipping: who pays, and the order value above which you cover it.
Those last three are what a buyer checks before deciding whether to read the products. Putting them at the bottom of page two is the most common template mistake and it costs orders.
Keep the header to the top eighth of the page. It is orientation, not content.
The product table, column by column
One row per sellable unit. A notebook that comes in three sizes and two colours is six rows, not one.
Image. A square thumbnail, same crop and same background for every row. Legible at stamp size on a phone.
SKU. Short, stable, the same code on your invoice and carton. NB-A5-NAV, not the numeric identifier your store generated.
Item name. What it is called on the shelf. "A5 notebook, navy, dotted."
Description. Fifteen words maximum. Material, size, page count, binding. A buyer needs the facts for their own shelf ticket.
Wholesale price. Per unit, excluding tax, with a note in the header saying so.
Case pack. How many they must take of that item. Where the number comes from is in case pack.
Case price. Wholesale times the case, printed out. Never make a buyer multiply.
Suggested retail. Their shelf price, so their margin is visible without arithmetic. How to set it is in suggested retail price.
Availability. In stock, or a date. Buyers plan around dates.
Nine columns is a lot for a phone screen, so in the exported layout, pair them: the image and name on the left, the four numbers in a tight block on the right, the description under the name in smaller type.
The terms block
One block at the foot of the last page, in plain sentences rather than legal language.
- Minimums, repeated from the header.
- Payment: prepaid on opening orders, and what qualifies an account for credit later.
- Volume tiers, if you publish them, as three rows at most.
- Freight: who pays, and the threshold above which you cover it.
- Damages: the window to report a breakage and what you do about it.
- Returns: usually none on wholesale, said plainly and kindly.
- Where and how to order: email, a form, or a portal login.
Two paragraphs, not two pages. A shop owner reading a wall of conditions from a brand they have never bought from will postpone, and postponement is how orders die.
Building it in something you can reuse
The version that survives is a spreadsheet with a tidy export, not a page laid out by hand.
Keep one sheet as the data: every column above, one row per item, nothing merged, no formatting tricks. Prices as numbers, not text. Case price as a formula rather than typed, so it cannot disagree with the unit price.
Keep a second sheet as the printable layout that pulls from the first. Changing a price then changes one cell and the whole document follows.
If you prefer a design tool for the final look, treat it as the export stage only and keep the numbers in the spreadsheet. The failure mode to avoid is a beautiful file where the prices exist only inside text boxes, because that file will eventually be wrong and nobody will notice.
A few practical rules that pay off later: no merged cells, a single row of headers, one item per row even when it feels repetitive, and a column marking whether the item is currently on the sheet so you can retire things without deleting history.
Naming, exporting and versioning
Export to PDF, at a size that opens quickly on shop wifi. A few megabytes, not thirty.
Name the file so it is findable in eight months: brandname-wholesale-line-sheet-autumn-2026.pdf. Files called final or v3 disappear into downloads folders.
Keep every version you have sent. A buyer will eventually order from a sheet you stopped using, and being able to see exactly what it said turns an argument into a correction.
Put the effective date in the footer of every page, so a sheet that escapes into the world carries its own expiry.
And change the sheet in the same sitting as you change anything it describes. A case pack that moves from six to twelve, a discontinued colour, a new lead time: if it does not reach the sheet that day, it will reach a buyer as a surprise instead.
Filling the template in for the first time
Three passes, and accept that the first is ugly.
First pass, fill in every field for every item, even the ones you have to guess, and mark the guesses. This is where you discover which products have no case pack decided and which have no photograph that works small.
Second pass, cut. Items you cannot make in quantity, items whose margin does not survive the check, items that exist in one colour you will not repeat. A focused sheet outsells a padded one.
Third pass, hand it to someone who does not know the product and ask them to build a two-hundred-dollar order. Whatever they ask you is the field you left out. Worked versions of the finished result, across three categories, are in line sheet examples.
Then send it somewhere useful. Pasting a product link into WholesalePilot previews the retailers and distributors that stock products like yours, which turns a finished template into a list of accounts to send it to.
Questions brands ask about line sheet templates
Should the template include tax? Show prices excluding tax and say so in the header. Wholesale buyers expect that convention.
Can one template cover boutiques and distributors? Keep one template and produce two exports. Distributor pricing should never appear on a sheet a boutique receives.
How many products fit? About twenty per page at a readable size. Past forty items, split by category or move to a catalogue.
Do I need a separate order form? A simple one helps: the same rows with a quantity column and a total. Most buyers will fill it in and email it back rather than typing an order from scratch.