Importing employee expenses or other misc purchases from CSV

[richardheap]

Hi Glenn and community

We switched over to QF from Sage at the start of our financial year, and it’s the end of the quarter so I have to import the director’s expenses. Sadly I hadn’t realised the power of receipt hub, so we haven’t started using that yet (I’m sure we will!) Our home brew expenses recording system spits out a CSV at the end of the quarter that we used to import into Sage
CP,1231,7503,0,30/06/15,CBJun15,expenses,39.81,T1,7.97,IMPORT
CP,1231,7504,0,30/06/15,CBJun15,expenses,34.39,T1,6.88,IMPORT
Here are two typical rows
It credits the relevant DLA (1231) and debits the relevant nominal code (7503/4)) using the net and VAT amounts specified. T1 = normal 20% VAT

There’s an excellent article covering this “What’s The Correct Procedure For Handling Employee Expense Payments When Tagging Bank Transactions” and looks like we are using Method 1.

My problem is that we’ve lost the original supplier name in the terse output from the expenses recording system. (Maybe the telecoms expense was vodafone, maybe it was skype.) And to be honest, I don’t really want to pollute the Supplier list with a bunch of suppliers like PC World, Rymans, Vodafone, etc etc. On the other hand I don’t think I’m able to import Vattable transactions into QF without a supplier.

Any suggestions? I’m happy to re-key the contents of the CSVs (though I would like to know how to import from CSV at a later date). Could I just set up a dummy supplier and a purchase per director (paid to the supplier by the director’s loan account), using the rows of the purchase to allocate to the various expense codes?

Next month I think we’ll work hard to implement receipt hub. Presumably I could continue to use the same dummy supplier for real itty bitty, unlikely to recur purchases.

Thanks in advance

[richardheap]

BTW - I just figured out how to import a “other” format CSV to the DLA, so that question is answered. It seems to confirm my suspicion that there’s no way to import the net amount and VAT separately as we’ve done before. What’s the best way to do this in QF?..

[Lurch]

You could just set up dummy suppliers, either completely generic, or per director or per type (telecoms / office equipment etc).

Regarding the specifics of what supplier exactly is related to which transaction obviously going forward the receipt hub will take care of this so all you need to do is be able to cross reference each of this last years expenses with the relevant invoice that you have a copy of outside of Quickfile if anyone ever asks.

Essentially you can pretty much do anything you want in reality, as long as you can correctly cross reference everything.