johnbits wrote on Mar 8
th, 2008 at 1:37am:
From Bob_Hansen
Quote: But there are some limitations with transactions.
Hi Bob. So...what type of transaction limitations have you found, and if listed somewhere by Intuit, where? Thanks!
~ John
Hello John.
Unless it has changed recently, they have never exported transactions in IIF formats, only exports lists.
This is from QuickBooks 2005 Help:
Quote:QuickBooks cannot include transaction data when it creates an export file. You can add transaction data yourself by editing the file or by using a spreadsheet program to create an import file.
But is does allow Import of transactions. I did provide an example of an import file in an earlier post. Again, from QuickBooks Help:
Quote:Importing transactions to QuickBooks
These instructions are rather long. You may want to print them instead of reading them onscreen. To print them, click Options and then choose Print Topic.
You can import transactions to QuickBooks, provided that the transaction data is in a text file that conforms to QuickBooks import file format. This is a tab- or comma-delimited text file in which the transaction data appears in columns. Special keywords identify the beginning and end of each transaction, and provide headings that indicate the type of information in each column.
And importing IIF files does have some potential issues where existing information may be overwritten or not accepted, so it may be necessary to preload some records. The Keys in Sesame must be exactly the same as the Keys in QuickBooks. QuickBooks does have some limitations that Sesame does not, so I have found it easier to maintain many of the Key values in QBooks, export them to Sesame for lookup lists in combo boxes. Sesame has much stronger reporting tools so all the details are maintained in Sesame, and summary transaction info is passed back to Qbooks. Qbooks had no type of macros/programming, but Sesame allows any type of automation you can program. You can't even do a Mass Update in Qbooks, but you can that in Sesame and send the results back.
Qbooks allows all types of errors to wrong accounts, using wrong customers, vendors, etc. because you cannot program any type of data validation, so do all that work in Sesame to force data integrity. Run audit reports in Sesame looking for invalid entries in QuickBooks. For instance, you may want a memo field in Qbooks transaction to always be filled in, with a certain data format, maybe a date-CustID-Invoice reference. Easy to do that incorrectly in Qbooks, or even leave the field blank. But you can run reports daily in Sesame on the Qbooks data and ID those transactions that do not meet your specs. Can get them corrected as soon as the reports are run. Because this is an import/export process, it is not real time, and lends itself to batch processing. The frequency depends on your needs and the working environment. I have most imports/exports/reports run in the evening just after backups are done.