Vendor export problem

[dgbarnes]

We originally imported all of our accounting data from an old version of RealWorld into Peachtree about five years ago. Everything has been fine, but there was a lot of junk in the files including a lot of old vendors. The new head of the acccounting department decided that it was time to get rid of a lot of the inactive vendors, but with over 8,000 in the file it would be a monumnetal task to look at each one manually. I thought it would be no problem to export the file to a CSV file and manipulate the required fields with a program but the export bombed. It turns out that the Default Purchase Account is blank on several thousand old vendors. Peach will use them with no problem, but it will not export them.

If anyone can point me to a solution I would very much appreciate it. I downloaded PawCom's Toolkit but since it uses Peachtree's engine it bombed in exactly the same way. Is there a tool in PawCom that will help? Any suggestions will be GREATLY appreciated.

[Lisa_p]

Don't export the default purchase account. I just tested it by only exporting the vendor ID and the inactive field. Changed the inactive to TRUE, imported and it marked that vendor inactive.

Only export the fields you need to determine if you want to keep them or not.

And of course, make a backup before you re-import!!

[dgbarnes]

Thanks Lisa,

But that hasn't worked for me. It could be the size of the file I suppose. I've run data verifcation over and over on my test database and the only errors I have now are the missing default purchase accounts. But I can try to export only the Vendor ID and it still crashes. This is an actual system crash with a memory exception error. I can export from any of my other tables with no problems.

Also, I should probably have mentioned this before: I entered a default purchase account for the first couple of hundred vendors (or at least those that didn't have one) and if I use a filter to export only those it works fine.

I'm going to run data verification one more time and try again, but so far those missing purchase accounts seem to be the culprit.

Davd

[dgbarnes]

Lisa,

You probably knew this, but I didn't have a clue. I'm the IT manager and I don't use Peach at all. I went into Vendor Defaults and entered a default purchase account, then ran data verification and it used that account to "fix" all of te errors it found (several thousand). I then exported anything and everything I wanted with no problem because apparently Peach had entered my new defualt purchase account for me.

But while I have your attention ;-) since I am not a Peach expert to say the least, if I export all the vendors and change the ID's and active/inactive fields on the ones we want then import them back to Peach, will that work? Will I have duplicate vendors? I can figure it all out by trial and error I guess but you could save me a lot of grief. Of course I will try everything we do on a test company with our data restored to it before I do it live.

Thanks so much for your help.

David

[dringstrom]

Any changes in your import file will update the existing records.

[dgbarnes]

Thanks David,

I assume I have to keep the import file in the same physical order if I want to use it to change Vendor ID's? I haven't had the chance to look that closely, but I don't see Peachtree's internal vendor number in the file. We've already discussed the fact that we might have to chane Vendor ID's manually, but if that's the case we can at least use export/import to flag about 80% of our vendors as inactive and then purge them.

Normally I would just experiment on my test databases and figure this stuff out, but we've had some major staff cutbacks and I'm running around in circles.

Bottom line, can I change the Vendor ID's on an export/import?

Thanks!
David

[Lisa_p]

If you change vendor IDs, you're going to end up with dups because PT will think the different ID is a new vendor.

So looks like you'll just have to do the inactive thing and then manually change the active vendor IDs that you want to change.

[dgbarnes]

Thnaks Lisa, I was afraid of that. That's going to leave a lot of vendors to change, but it's better than nothing.

I wonder of PawCom or any other utility might access the table directly and let me do it?

Thanks again for the help.
David

[dringstrom]

You can either inactivate the old ID and import the new ID, or manually change the IDs. If you want to preserve the history by simply changing the IDs, one way to do this is to use a scripting software to loop through the keystrokes in Peachtree. It takes some experience to do this successfully, but it is an alternative to consider if warranted. I don't think PawCOM (http://www.acctadv.com/pawcom) would work for this, but you can certainly run the question by the folks at www.multiwareinc.com (http://www.multiwareinc.com).

[dgbarnes]

Thanks David, I really appreciate all the help. I think we've decided to just change them manually as we use them. At some point, all the fancy stuff is just not worth it.

David