Tonight I went through pages 118-123 in the F100 Hands-On Financials (V4.0) course. Even though there were only a few pages, I spent quite a bit of time going through them (data import always takes a lot of time). The sample file that was created for import had some errors which made for good practice.
Overall, I like the import tool. First you create a mapping definition between your Excel file and the screen that you are importing into. Then you run the import. The errors appear next to each bad record, then you have the choice to fix the data in the screen or export it to Excel where you can make corrections and then re-import.
It’s a little bit of a pain to have to create a mapping definition between Excel and the Acumatica screen. Other import tools that I’ve seen just require Excel file to be in a certain format and then you import directly from Excel. However, the nice thing about creating a mapping definition is that you can re-use the definitions that you create. You can even schedule them to run on an interval, such as every night.
There are over 140 screens in the Finance area alone that can accept imports. That’s a lot of screens! Dynamics GP and Sage 500 ERP don’t have anywhere near that amount. I have to say though that I expected to see something like this from Acumatica because data integration is a key component of a typical web-based product philosophy.
You can also import for things other than Excel, such as another Microsoft SQL Server database, an ACH file from a bank, Salesforce, and XML. This makes the import routine very powerful as an integration tool since you always need to bring data in from multiple places when you are trying to make your ERP system the cornerstone of your business.
Next I will move on to importing other things such as Customers, a Trial Balance, etc. Hopefully I don’t get bogged down with errors as much as I did with the vendors. After I get through Data Migration, I will be finished with the F100 Hands-On Financials (V4.0) course.