Exporting/Importing Check Registers in Quickbooks

General Questions
#1

Please help me understand mapping in Quickbooks when trying to import a check register. I can’t get it to work, and clearly I’m missing something/don’t understand what QB needs me to do.

My corporate accounting office exports Quickbooks check registers into Excel to send to the local offices. I won’t go into detail, but it would be great if these Excel files could be imported back into Quickbooks locally.

I get stuck because the headers from the exported file do not match the options QB gives me for mapping.

Exported file headers are:

Type
Num
Date
Name
Account
Paid Amount
Original Amount

Mapping Options are (Import Type set to Account):

Type
Number
Name
Description
Bank Acct No./Card No/Note
Opening Balance
As of (Date)
Remind me to order checks…
Income Amt for Reimb. Expenses
Is Inactive

I map Type to Type, Number to Num, Name to Name, As of (Date) to Date. But am I supposed to map Descripton to Account (this is a GL account in the export file)? What do I map Paid Amount to? When I map things according to the limited options I’m given, all I get is errors. I’ve tried it a couple of different ways, and it doesn’t work. I get “0 files imported, save errors?”

I know I’m stoopid, but I don’t get it.

#2

Won’t importing the register again duplicate every item in the registry? I may not be understanding what you’re trying to do, but it sounds impossible to me using just Excel and QuickBooks (and I’m a QB Certified ProAdvisor). If you ask me, Intuit has gone out of their way to ensure that QuickBooks is incompatible with everything.

When I do Excel import/export operations, I use Big Red Consulting’s Excel add-ons. http://www.bigredconsulting.com/

#3

In short, what I’m trying to do is effectively transfer the QB check register from a computer in Accounting to another computer with QB at the station. I want to duplicate what Accounting has in their Quickbooks on a different computer.

A cursory visit to the Big Red site, though, indicates this can’t be done for free. God lord, that’s a lot of converters, and that can’t be good.

#4

BRC’s Transaction Copier will do that. It isn’t free, but it’s not unreasonable if it saves you a few hours of labor. The thing to watch out for is that you don’t accidentally duplicate transactions and to remember that the import creates new transactions and cannot update existing ones.

I bought into BRCs tools after a QuickBooks Accountant Copy import failed and we had to figure out how to get 1700 new transactions from our Acct Copy into the client’s copy. There was simply no way to do it with free tools in the 2008 version and I don’t think that’s changed in the 2009 edition.

#5

That’s very, very helpful, dracoi. Thank you.

Once again, The Dope comes through and makes me look like a genius at work.