Journal uploading - there must be a way of uploading a batch journal from excel without paying a third party? its fundamental and you can upload every other type!

Just accidentily came across the functionality to upload journals within QBs - not sure when this became available as I have been wanting this for some time and it previously wasn't available from within QB.

It eventually worked just fine but took nearly 3 hours to work out why my CSV file was being rejected.  Having now worked out why, QBs need to fix some glaring problems:

1.  The process requires your csv file to have the name of the account used in QB chart of accounts.  Sounds easy enough but very much not OK.  I use account numbers and I also mark many accounts as sub-accounts of another account (so that they sub-total in reports etc).  Took me quite a while to figure out that the name required in the upload file was a combination of the "account number total account name:sub account name".   In my case this included having to use for example a name - "6515 Food & Bev, Consumables etc:Cook Pension".  The account name shown in the Chart of Accounts is actually "Cook Pension" and the account number is "6515", the account is a sub-totalled under "6500T Food & Bev, Consumables etc."  Nowhere does it begin to suggest how to get the correct account name combination

2.  Why on earth doesn't it just work off account number - in the above example "6515" would do it.

3.  Having got the account names to stop rejecting it then accepted the journal but just endlessly hung - "we are working on it".  Had to cancel that and checked that nothing had been posted.  Finally guessed that it didn't like a "-" that the csv file had in place of 0 and then wouldn't accept the journal until several 0s had been removed.  That could be reasonable but it doesn't even hint at why it is hanging but actually these uplaods are useful for regular journals that change each month.  In such circumstances the template sometimes has zeros for a particular line in any given month - this upload requires you to delete the rows from the journal each time, which is a pain.

So journal uploads work within QBs but getting the account name right is a real pain - please can this not be changed to just simply use the account number.

DavidM