Converting old payers/payees to customers/suppliers

This was resolved in version 20.8.91, 4 days ago. You can read about it in the Guides on recording receipts and payments if you are nervous about updating.

No it’s not. The supplier and customers are linked to other, not to supplier and customer dropdowns.

It’s working for you, because you don’t use supplier and customers so the way it is currently linked now is how you use Manager. But for people like myself where are all the payees and payers are my customers and suppliers, I still have them all linked to other not customer and supplier.

I don’t understand this statement. Both customers and suppliers can be linked to either payers or payees on both receipts and payments. The Other type of payer or payee allows free text entries. The purpose of the change was to allow customers/suppliers to be entered as payers/payees. And that is now possible.

This is the second time you have made this false statement. In another thread, I gave an example of one business in which suppliers are not necessary. I was arguing for the necessity of being able to enter payers/payees who are not defined as customers/suppliers. I never said I do not use customers and suppliers. And I gave a hypothetical example of an all-cash business.

You can fix this after you update. I also wrote about that in the other thread. All you need to do is (1) sort the Batch Update spreadsheet by Contact (purely for convenience in using the spreadsheet fill functions), (2) enter or fill CUSTOMER or SUPPLIER in the PayerPayeeType column for each transaction, and (3) fill the UUIDs in the Customer and Supplier columns. You may need to convert one transaction for each customer/supplier manually to determine what the UUIDs are. From there, you can fill down, fill up, or copy and paste to complete the other rows. I retroactively converted all my old receipts and payments for six years worth of accounting records from all my businesses to show customers/suppliers in the payer/payee fields (where appropriate) in about 10 minutes. In the same process, I determined which I would leave as Other type payers/payees.

I think that he is asking for a conversion of the previous inserted Clients/Suppliers from Other to a link. This is something that will need a find and recode function.

This is what I addressed in my final paragraph of post #23. The FIND function was taken care of by sorting the spreadsheet by Contact. The RECODE occurred using the spreadsheet’s fill function. That was probably faster than a built-in Find & Recode would have been, because I could do it as a batch instead of having to annotate each transaction individually.

Lubos promised an automatic functionality inside Manager. This is a manual workaround.

Yes, it is. But it works without waiting for a new feature and is probably faster than the new feature will be. The disadvantage is having to find the UUIDs.

a: can you split the topic regarding converting old customer/supplier transactions to new payee/payer fields as this has nothing to do with the original topic.

b: I was referring to the conversion of previous clients/supplierst from other to customer/supplier. I thought it was obvious what I was referring to! The developer said that he was going to implement this, so I see no point in doing this myself as it will be implemented in a new release and I don’t have to worry about UUID’s!

c: I fail to understand why I should have to work out how to use the find and recode functionality to convert my previous payments/receipts to move the customers/suppliers to the correct field. If it had been the other way around and all of the payees were linked to the customers/suppliers you would have complained of having to recode everything. In point of fact, this was an issue that you raised in the topic about the new changes - saying you did not want to have to convert hundreds of payees/payers to the new system before the developer changed it to the current other, customer and supplier model. If it’s not good enough to expect you to convert your system to the new system, then why should other people have to?

Done.

I don’t think he meant it would be automatic. The program would have no way of resolving differences between payers/payees with the same names as customers/suppliers but who were different individuals. It also would not be able to associate Bob Jones with Robert Jones if you previously entered inconsistent names. Nor would it be able to determine whether someone set up as both customer and supplier should be considered as one or the other for a particular transaction. That might not matter to you, but the parallel discussion about tax reporting and segregating what’s a refund on a sale versus a purchase demonstrates it is quite important to others. I believe he was just referring to an eventual Find & Recode capability.

You don’t have to. It is entirely optional. You have survived for years without the ability to link. Now it is available. But you don’t have to use it. I was just telling you a quick way to incorporate the linkage retroactively if you want to use it.

No, I would not have been. All existing payers/payees would have had to have been set up as customer/suppliers. That would have been frustrating because it caused unnecessary work, but there would be no unassociated payers/payees on prior transactions. We would just have a new capability going forward. What the reverse situation would have offered is the ability to very rapidly unlink payers/payees and possibly disable unnecessary tabs.

No, you misunderstand the issue. Before the Other category was added, there was no payer/payee on old transactions. If you did not update, you did not experience this. The addition of the Other category solved that problem and allowed linkage to customers/suppliers.

Again, you misunderstand the new implementation. The original change left every single receipt/payment without a payer/payee, whether or not the original payer/payee was a customer or supplier. It was possible to create customer/supplier linkages, but they did not occur automatically. And non-customers/suppliers could not be entered at all. That is why it was not acceptable to ask everyone to convert to the original version of the new system. The revised change allows all categories of payers/payees. So it fits every business model. Nobody is forced into any approach. But the changeover is still not automatic. Every payer/payee just becomes an Other unless and until switched.

The advantage of waiting for a Find & Recode function is that you will be able to scan hundreds or thousands of receipts/payments and check which ones you want to convert to a specific customer/supplier. It will be a visual process.

The disadvantages are not only that you will have to scan and check every past transaction, but that you will have to repeat the process for every customer/supplier. Meanwhile, a Batch Update lets you do everything at once.

In terms of what you are or are not forced into, don’t forget that after updating you do not have to convert. You can leave past receipt/payment payers/payees as they are, in the Other category. That can be a permanent decision, or you can wait until a Find & Recode function comes along. Or you can decide later to do a Batch Update.

I appreciate the enormous amount of feedback and activity. I also feel that sometimes the responses are a bit rough making us feel stupid with repeated reference to us “misunderstanding” the approach, concept, application, etc. The issue raised here is simple and was originally recognized as something that would be fixed with the support of the developer helping with a tool that helps us converting payees to customers and suppliers. The good change in better mapping payees should include such tool as rightly stated it can not be fully automated because of for example mis-matches of name entries. Elegant solutions would include the current Payee entries on on-side and the list of existing customers or suppliers on the other side (based on selection of receipt or payment). The user should then be able to quickly “map” the field. I have seen such approach before but can not recall with which application and will look it up. Essentially this would be query driven. So rather than arguing and referring to a rough shortcut I would prefer to have a discussion on how his much more elegantly can be resolved, support the developer with potential options, etc rather than sometimes feeling treated as not understanding what I should be doing.

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I had assumed the enhanced find and recode would function similar to the existing find and recode. Which is:

  1. Use search to find entries of relevance (or at least exclude the majority which aren’t relevant

  2. Check the actual entries you want to change (or select all and unselect the entries which shouldn’t be changed).

  3. Choose the change you want to make

This could be enhanced by allowing

  • Showing transaction level entries not just line item level data in step 1 above

  • Show and allow changing a larger range of variables eg Payee/payer is “Customer” / “Supplier” / “Other”. Actual Customer or supplier or free text entry.

  • (Support on Summary screen drill down not just “Receipts & Payments” tab. - In brackets as including a search for the Manager account provides similar functionality)

I exported the receipts/payments and opened it in Excell. The only columns I find are: “Date” “#” “Description” “Payee / Payer” “Account” “Amount received” “Amount paid”. I can not find a “PayerPayeeType” column nor “Customer” and “Supplier” columns. When exporting Customers or Suppliers the only columns I get are “Name” “Email address” “Invoices” “Accounts receivable”. No “UUID” column, so no clue how to get this done manually. I also noted that I can not batch update a lot of customer or supplier details such as “Currency”, “Address”, “Email Address” and “Credit limit” for example from a spreadsheet.

Modification of the payer/payee field to include customers/suppliers cannot be done with an Export. It must be done with Batch Update. Exports only include what shows on the screen. Batch Update gives you the entire record.

The same answer applies. You can get the UUID for customers/suppliers from the Batch Update of Receipts & Payments. As I wrote, you need to have at least one manual entry for each customer/supplier in order to see what they are.

Yes, you can. But you must Batch Update the Customers or Suppliers tabs, not Receipts & Payments.

The word you quote was not directed to you. In fact, you were not yet a participant in this thread when it was used. It was used in response to comments by another forum member who—according to what he wrote in another thread—had not yet installed the update he was commenting about. In fact, this entire thread was split from another one because he took that discussion off topic. So the full context of this thread is missing.

Dear Tut, I know you did not use "misunderstanding: related to me. However you may have noticed that I kept it general (us) as you responded to me that way in another thread and even when not addressed to me in my view it is not a very constructive way to get results.

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