Batch converting old freeform contacts on payments and receipts

I am looking to update Server version to the latest version.

My current version is June of this year. I delayed updating due to all the changes relating to determining whether a transaction was a payment or receipt and resulting tax code issues which caused a lot of issues in August this year.

I was also waiting to see if there would be a batch convert option to convert all my customer/suppliers on payments and receipts form from the old freestyle form fill that was used in years past (and is still in use on my current version) to the new format with other, customers and suppliers. I am very pleased with the new format of others, customer and suppliers which I think is much better, but I am not keen on having to manually convert thousands of payments/receipts to show the customer/supplier in the new customer/supplier fields.

Has anyone managed to batch convert all their free form contacts on payments receipts forms?

Also would it be possible to have bank rules include an option to select default customer/supplier as this would make bank importing perfect as result.

Yes. I did a Batch Update to accomplish exactly what you describe. It took, literally, less than 10 minutes per business. The steps were:

  1. After copying and pasting into a spreadsheet, I sorted the spreadsheet by the Contact column to group transactions by individual Customers, Suppliers, and what were then undesignated (but became Others).
  2. I entered the PayeePayerType for each name in the list, using the fill feature of the spreadsheet.
  3. I next prepared a reference list of UUIDs for Customers and Suppliers by beginning the Batch Update process in each of those tabs. The resulting spreadsheets were sorted (only for convenience) to place names in the same order as in the spreadsheet for Step 1.
  4. Finally, I copied, pasted, and filled UUIDs from my reference spreadsheets to the Step 1 spreadsheet.

After completing the Batch Update, every prior transaction was now categorized correctly as a Customer, Supplier, or Other under the Payer/payee field.

Depending on exactly what you mean, this is already possible. If the allocation account for a bank rule is Accounts receivable or Accounts payable, the customer or supplier field also appears. Any bank transaction fitting the description criteria is then allocated to that customer’s/supplier’s subaccount. The payer/payee should already be included in the imported bank transaction.

I think that is in this ideas thread

@Patch Yes I created that idea. Now that suppliers and customers are linked properly in the receipts and payments tab, the next logical step would be to have bank rules autofill the contacts field so it’s not blank in the payments/receipts tab view.

@Tut - Thanks for this. I will give this a try now and see if this works.

@Tut could you update the batch update guides to highlight that one must not use the format row to make all rows same height. I did this to make it easier to see not realising that this would mess up the invoice amounts as there are some several invoice amounts in one row. I only discovered this when I was ready to import the file.

So I had to delete that excel file and redo the work all over again. Not a major problem as it was much quicker second time around and it gave me the chance to change the date format in the desktop version as this was in American instead of UK format, whereas my live Server version was obviously already in UK format. So I probably would have had to redo the excel file for the date reason anyway.

But it is an easy mistake to make to format all the rows so that the rows are all one line height as this is so much easier to view all data.

Unfortunately not, because what you describe is related to a feature of a specific spreadsheet application. To the maximum extent feasible, Guides are independent of references to other specific applications.

Further, having all rows the same height in a spreadsheet only has the effect of hiding some lines from multi-line transactions. While you might unintentionally ignore those lines because you are not aware of their presence, they will not be “messed up”, as you put it. They just won’t be edited.