Wise Accounts Blog

The bane of accounting programs is that one you used one your data is pretty much tied up to it. It is probably by design from the part of the software vendor to make sure you can't walk away from their product easily and use a competitor.

It shouldn't be that way and this article will explain how you can save yourself a lot of typing if you managed to save your data into a text file.

The quickest way to get you on your way is to reverse engineer what Wise Accounts does with the backup/reload (these menus appear once you have a paid subscription).

The idea is that if you use the backup file from the Smith&Co or John Citizen demo as a template you can reload your own data in one hit.

accounts
id name type memo recipient subject last year balance checkbal
4 Petrol 3 28726.40 5863

postings
id p_date reconciled account checkno dissection comment amount
1 01 Jul 2009 0 6 0 Opening Balance 11327.5

There are only two tables to worry about: the accounts table and the postings table. Each field is separated by a TAB. (The Tab key is above the Caps Lock key on the left of your keyboard. Like a space it is an invisible character but some program can render it with a marker.) For the accounts table the only fields to worry about are the id (that's the account number), the name, the type (income, expense, bank account - they are listed in the types table - you can always change that later in Wise Accounts once you data has been uploaded.). Make sure you have the right number of TABs on each line otherwise you will get an error.

For the postings table the fields are id (an incremental counter), p_date (posting date), reconciled (0 = no, 1 = yes), account (the account number as per the accounts table above), checkno (leave it blank), dissection (leave it at 0), the comment (a good practice is to put the name of the matching double-entry account) and a signed amount. Simple isn't it?

If this is too daunting send us an email and we will try to do it for you.

If you are using MYOB there is a procedure to automate this.

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