THIS IS TEDIOUS

February 4, 2014 4:18 PM

Is there a way to quickly feed a whole bunch of vendor bills into Quickbooks?

At work, I regularly have to enter 50-60 bills for the same dozen or so vendors in QB. This is tedious as hell and the repetitiveness makes it error-prone, which is also annoying.

Is there a way to automate this? If I had a spreadsheet or a CSV file with the vendor name, reference number and amount, can I feed that into QB somehow?

If there's a paid solution (some sort of add-on) I'm entirely sure my boss will consider it, because this is a really annoying bottleneck. Moving away from QB is not an option. If this also works for paying bills individually (i.e. not as a batch payment) that would be the best.

posted by griphus to Computers & Internet (6 answers total)

QuickBooks has its own import format, an IIF file, that can be used to import vendor bills among other lists and transactions. Intuit's site (linked on "IIF File") has templates and instructions. This won't import them and pay in one step AFAIK. It's far from ideal but the format is simple (a flat file). Please pay close attention to the "Limitations" section in the documentation.
posted by graymouser at 4:36 PM on February 4, 2014 [3 favorites]

I'm not sure about importing, but would memorized transactions work for you? Are the bills for the same amount each month, or a different amount?

You can memorize bills so that the bill automatically enters in the system, and then update the amount if that would help.
posted by needlegrrl at 5:28 PM on February 4, 2014

Response by poster: Memorizing won't work; the bills all have unique reference names/numbers that they need to be tracked by and there's no pattern to when the order is placed or how much it will cost.
posted by griphus at 5:42 PM on February 4, 2014

Propersoft pretty much just writes QuickBooks/Quicken converters. CSV2IIF (propersoft.net/csv2iif) is one of those applications.

I have the full suite of converters and most of the conversions I have done revolved around taking bank statements and prepping those for mass input. While what you are doing is going to be different in terms of the data type, the process is similar.

The main issues I found were that while this process is a real time saver, at the same time you need to be very aware as to how you "map" the data into the converter. It is not rocket science really, but be patient and RUN TESTS first. It is important that you are formatting to the version of Quickbooks that you use.
posted by lampshade at 6:32 PM on February 4, 2014 [1 favorite]

Also, I am not saying that CSV2IIF is the exact converter you need, so check out the page with all the converters.
posted by lampshade at 6:34 PM on February 4, 2014 [1 favorite]

Best answer: Ok, so CSV2IIF wasn't exactly what I needed, but my boss and I stumbled across Zed Axis which does this and a bunch of other stuff, so I am going to be gauche and mark my own answer as best answer. Thanks everyone!
posted by griphus at 12:46 PM on February 13, 2014