Manual entry in Metrc works fine at low volume. Past a certain point, harvesting hundreds of plants, adjusting a long list of packages, catching up a week of retail sales, clicking through the same form over and over stops being practical. Data Import is the CSV upload path built for exactly that.
Twenty-One Actions, One Upload Page
The Data Import page, reached from the upload icon in the top navigation bar or directly from the Import Sales button on the Sales Receipts page, supports bulk versions of most actions available elsewhere in Metrc: plantings from plants or from packages, split plantings, immature plant additives and waste, packages from a mother plant, immature plant packages, growth phase changes, destroying immature or mature plants, plant location changes, plant additives and waste at the mature stage, manicure batches, harvests, destroying plants, packages from a harvest, lab results, package adjustments, and both new and updated sales records.
Only the tabs matching your facility's permissions actually display, so a Retailer isn't going to see a Harvest Plants import option any more than they'd see it as a manual action.
Order Matters
If you're uploading more than one type of CSV in the same session, upload them in the order Metrc lists the actions in, immature plant actions before flowering actions, before harvest actions, before package actions, and so on. The reason is simple: these files can reference the same plant or package, and Metrc processes them in sequence. If a manicure CSV and a destroy CSV both reference the same plant, the manicure has to be recorded first, or the destruction record has nothing left to attach to.
The same logic applies within a single action type. If you're adding plants to the same harvest or manicure batch across multiple files, upload them one at a time rather than all at once, for the same collision-avoidance reason.
The 500-Row Ceiling
Every CSV file is capped at 500 rows, with one exception: Lab Results imports aren't subject to that limit. If you're bulk-processing more than 500 records of any other type, that's multiple files, not one long one. Metrc publishes a CSV Formatting Guide under its Support menu with the exact column structure required for each action type and a worked example, worth having open the first several times you build one of these files by hand.
All or Nothing, Per File
Once a file is uploaded, its status shows as either Successfully Imported or Error - Not Imported. There's no partial credit. If an error occurs anywhere in the file, none of its records get processed, not just the row that failed. The error detail gives you the specific row and a message describing what went wrong, which is what you fix before re-uploading, not something you can patch around after the fact.
The Uploaded File Details log keeps a running record of every file submitted for that facility: the filename, when it was uploaded, how many entries it contained, its status, and which employee submitted it. That log is worth checking after any bulk upload, silently assuming success on a large batch is how errors sit unnoticed for weeks.