I have been trying out several variations of loading transactions into QuickBooks to minimize the manual entries required to convert from Peachtree to QuickBooks. I tried loading checks and matching them to bills but that did not work as expected. I have now decided to load the bills and use the “Pay Bills” portion of QuickBooks to create the corresponding checks. I have imported Vendors, Customers, Classes, Items, and Accounts lists into my spreadsheet so I can validate the fields in Excel. My plan is to import and reconcile one month at a time. Today I successfully imported a transaction that charges the item to the correct item, account, house(i.e. Customer), class, and vendor. This data is necessary to get the reports to come out correctly. Importing an itemized bill is a little different than the examples so I had to try a couple variations until I got it to work. The example provided by Intuit showed how to import a non-itemized bill. Looks like I am ready to go.

I finally got around to working on importing transactions into QuickBooks. It was actually easier than I expected.

1. I imported an IIF example into a new Excel 2003 spreadsheet as a template.
2. I exported the chart of accounts, customers, and vendors lists from QuickBooks.
3. I imported the lists into the new spreadsheet as separate worksheets.
4. I imported the downloaded data into a new worksheet.
5. Using the IIF example as the template I linked the cells in the template back to the downloaded data and created data validation lists for account and vendor cells using the lists that I had imported.
6. I cleaned up the account and vendor cells and then saved as a text(tab-delimited) file.
7. I then went into QuickBooks and imported the file.

An alternative to this is to use a spreadsheet add-in from Big Red Consulting. I looked at their products and tried one out. Their products have a slicker interface and several of their products are specifically tailored to certain tasks(e.g. ebay into QuickBooks). I encountered a little funkiness with the add-in I tried out and that got me to wondering how hard could this be. Ultimately I decided to code my own because I was curious if this was as easy as I thought it should be. Since I was working on this for a non-profit I volunteer with, I opted for intellectual pursuit solution and was pleasantly surprised with this simplistic solution. It is not as slick as Big Red but I know what everything is doing and it works.