Hello
I am doing a migration from another software to manager.
I have uploaded Customers, Suppliers, Items and sales and purchase invoices.
Now I have to “mark” those invoices paid. In other words I have to create payable and receivable entries to match the invoice amounts paid.
How can I do that?
you could have just migrated with the starting balances as on date. this is explained in the guides.
anyway it is your choice if you want to have a record of all prior transactions in Manager.
you can either
- set a start date and make a single line receipt/payment dated prior to the start date for the total receivable/payable amount for each customer/supplier. you do not select anything in the Invoice column and let Manager allocate the amount automatically.
- make multi-line receipt/payment against individual invoices for each customer/supplier. you may find batch operations helpful for this.
What @sharpdrivetek did not state explicitly is that you do not “mark” invoices as paid. The program determines automatically whether they are paid based on your receipts and payments. This is one of the many reasons trying to recreate prior history from another accounting system is not advised. This is not just a characteristic of Manager. Porting entire histories from one accounting system to another without very expensive custom software is almost always impossible. At a minimum, it is very difficult. You cannot, for example, even port reliably from one Intuit program to another.
This is the reason Manager has its starting balances feature.
As you haven’t imported the bank transactions yet, Manager will be showing what the the accounts would be if no one paid for anything.
The best solution depends what electronic history you have so can use to import.
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If the overlap is not too large you could import the bank transactions for that period (if you have or can download load them from your bank) and use Manager’s bank rules to allocate as appropriate.
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As above but use Manager’s “Receipts & Payments” batch create to import the bank transactions.
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Export the payment/ receipt history from your prior accounting system then use batch create to import the bank transactions into Manager.
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If don’t have individual transaction electronic data, you could use the fact Manager allocates payments/receipts to invoices starting at the oldest first so a single payment will set accounts receivable / payable to the correct amount, paying all prior invoices. Done manually or via a batch operation.
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Set a start date and starting balanced in Manager to ignore prior entries.
Thanks @Tut. Allow me to disagree about how “impossible” it is to migrate the transaction history. I’m doing this for 30 years. I have done it for many different systems. Yes, back in 90’s we were avoiding this task and preferred the starting balances. But now this is a must. How difficult this is depends upon how sophisticated are the importing tools provided by the target system and the access that the consultant has to the database itself. JDE had the best importing tool. You just uploaded all invoice lines and map the columns. Then you could perform a test run and the system showed you the resulting situation of your upload. At the final run everything (invoices, payments, receivables/payables etc) were updated automatically. You were ready to run journals and customer statements for validation.
On the other hand, Manager has the most difficult importing tool I’ve seen - it requires advanced programming skills to prepare the invoice data for upload, completely undocumented - someone has to discover everything through a difficult RND process, and no result validation report. Someone would think that the developer’s intention is exactly to discourage transaction upload for what reason I cannot tell.
Never the less, my RND efforts were successful, and now I have conquered this knowledge.
If you like, I can provide a documentation of the whole process and the programming code I had to develop for the data preparation.
Thanks @Patch. My customer provided me with excel files. The invoice file has a column for the amount paid. Using this information and a download of the already uploaded invoices - with some VLOOKUPs and calculations, I think I can create the payment receipts.
WHY?
There are thousands of businesses who change their accounting system each year and of those very few need to migrate the data.
There are thousands of businesses who change their accounting system each year and of those very few need to migrate the data.
Hello @Brucanna.
How you judge this? I am doing this exact business since 1989 (ERP consultant) and everyone - I mean everyone - that has asked me to supervise the migration to another system has asked for transaction migration also. Of course, back in the 90’s they all had to compromise with the fact the transaction migration was impossible (so we were telling them. It was not in fact impossible, but so difficult and unpredictable that we preferred not to involve with it). But today, all systems have their own importing-and-validation tools, with their difficulty level each and most of them (the systems) - at least the modern ones - provide a REST API to interfere with their database in a controlled way. The customers know that. They are demanding transaction migration as one of the main criteria of ERP selection.
This is why it is a must.
Manager is not, and does not pretend to be, an ERP
It is an account software package for small, or not so small, businesses with little or no specialist accounting staff
@Joe91 I think this is not a matter of terminology or sizing.
Manager does have sales and purchase invoices. It does have payments. All these exist to other “small accounting software systems” as well, that are either old and obsolete or lack characteristics that manager offers etc (you name it). So there are plenty of “little” businesses who were using such a “little” accounting software and now they like to migrate to manager. But they want their transactions there as well. Except if you mean that “small, or not so small, businesses with little or no specialist accounting staff” have no concern about their old transactions and they will start from scratch anyway.
My recent customer is a trading business which was using vtiger as invoicing software. I have turned them to manager. They have a cloud account now. But they wanted to have the transactions history there (at least the recent one) at least the purchases with all the discounts they had. So I leveled up my sleeves and have the job done. But my complain is that it could be a bit easier for me…
@Dimitris_Kontodimos, I agree almost all Manager users would like historical data in Manager when moving to Manager. If making a system change there must be features in Manager they like, so having access to them would be of value, even if it is just continuity of data access / record lookup.
I suspect the problems is, many of Managers users do not have your skills to import data, nor do they have an appreciation of the task difficulty / cost, and most are not willing to pay for the service.
As a result the standard answer is; importing data is too hard, set starting balances and a start date. A task most users can achieve. As a result most users do not import data and a proportionate amount of program effort is invested it the capability.
In my opinion, if you were willing providing some guidance on lesions learned, that would be very valuable to other users who value the data import enough to invest in doing it.
In addition, if you were interested in providing the service to other users, listing your contact details here https://www.manager.io/accountants/countries would be a excellent idea. Manager users often have difficulty knowing who to ask when they want more from their accounting system. (Note I have no authority to determine what is publishable there, I only have an opinion on what I think would be useful to others).
Thanks @Patch. This link you have provided is for accountant registration.
But I am not an accountant. I know only the basics. I am an IT consultant and programmer. I can help in deep in software manipulation and operations, but not with laws and accounting rules.
I can provide documentation, webinars and services to anyone need advanced operations as transaction migration. This service - as you have mentioned - requires advanced skills and experience, but great effort as well. So it has to be paid accordingly.
My last migration took me about 30 hours of data preparation, uploading, validation, delete and all over again until achieving the desired result. I understand this could be “big money” charge when we are talking about manager that has a free version and its price is 32$ per month (384$ per year). But this is once-off and the total amount (total hours of work) depends upon the easiness of the importing tool.
You are correct, hence my disclaimer.
You did however provide Manager specific services, and could probably do it more efficiently than others the second time round.
Sure @Patch. This is my intention. I’m here to help. I am a little fussy though, but you can forgive me due to my age (I am 58, almost 60).
By the thousands departing Quickbooks and Zero.
That’s not surprising. Those businesses not wanting migration services wouldn’t be knocking on your door
So @Brucanna, what you say is that there are thousands that migrate to other systems without any help from an IT consultant, so IT consultants have no idea of them that they really exist, and they know only those who ask for their help.
Obviously, you are not an IT consultant
Yes
Yes
Correct, but entirely irrelevant.