Hi, I was very, very enthusiastic about QuickFile until I discovered to my horror that you can create multi-line sales invoices manually but you can’t import them. Can this really be true? How many invoices does anyone ever create with only one line in them? In my profession I have labour, parts and certification for example. Is there not a tool to import a CSV file where each row represents a line of the invoice?
If this really is not possible then a secondary question is: how do I completely delete all traces of my account with QuickFile?
Most cloud accounting systems don’t support what you’re asking for.
I’ve explained this elsewhere but CSV files are tabular, columns and rows. Typically each row would define an invoice and a column would define some property of that invoice.
How would you include the header information and the row data for an invoice in a CSV file? Do you have an example of a CSV file containing this information?
Hi Glenn, thank you for your quick response. The very next online accounting software I looked at was called zoho and it has almost the same feature but if, in the same csv file, there are rows with the same invoice number then those rows get added as further lines of the same invoice. I’m guessing that information that is only needed once per invoice, like e.g. the date, is either ignored in follow-on lines or overwritten by the values given in the follow-on lines. Also they seem to have a more comfortable field mapping facility so you can use your own terminology in the csv file.
The downside of zoho is that I have to pay, but at least is does what I require. I suggest you take a look at it, there is a 14 day free trial period to do experiments like this.
I would certainly recommend you take some time to explore the differences in detail. Many of the US based cloud accounting applications don’t cater very well for UK/EU tax legislation. Many don’t even support basic VAT reporting.
I can’t really comment on the minute differences between varying accounting applications. Although we work on the basis of user feedback and prioritise those features that are requested the most frequently on this forum.
For now I will switch this thread to a feature request and we will track the interest in this going forward. If in the mean time you decide QuickFile is not going to do the job for you of course we would be disappointed but you are able delete your account by following the procedure here.
Hi, newbie here.
but also come across only being able to import single line invoices.
Luckily i only have 200 invoices to go and make additions to, others are all single line invoices.
Would be really good if you could put this in a feature request.
otherwise you loose too much customer transaction information
Can I ask if multi line invoice importing is under consideration.
We think Quickfile is great and love 99% of the features but we have to produce 100+ multi line invoices every month. We found that Kashflow offers this feature so for the past year have been running Kashflow for invoices and Quickfile for all of our other accounting entries. With our turnover growing at 50% p.a. this situation cannot continue and need to find a solution.
Is there any chance this feature will be introduced in 2017? We would happily pay for the facility!
@HastingsWorks - I’m not aware of the situation regarding this, but I’m sure my colleague @Glenn will come back to you as soon as he can.
Regarding your offer for assistance, that’s very kind of you! They’re more than welcome to have a look at developing a marketplace app which would utilise our API and be available for all QuickFile users. I’ll update my post shortly with more details on this.
Hi Glenn
I also need to import multiple line invoices from a billing platform. The billing platform (Billingbooth) puts out a csv file with each item having the same invoice number. Has this issue been resolved yet on Quickfile?
Does your billing platform provide full invoices for what the customer is charged for? You may be able to bulk the sales into one monthly invoice for the sake of accounting for them in QuickFile.
The key thing is, you have the backing documents (which would be the invoices from Billingbooth in this case).
Is there any further news on a multi line import facility? We’ve been using Quickfile for a while now, but the task of manually recreating multi line invoices from an Excel sheet which our other software solution already generates is becoming far too onerous for Quickfile to be a viable medium term solution for our business.
There aren’t any updates here at the moment I’m afraid.
However, there may be an easier way of entering your data. Could you tell us a bit more about your other software package please - does this generate invoices for you, is it like POS system, or something completely different?
Our other software produces lines of activity from a database, so a “service type” then a date, and a cost etc. With clients who have up to 20 lines of activity in a month recreating each line again in Quickfile is quickly becoming a bit of a nightmare. A feature where we could import these lines into an invoice per client is what we need next to streamline the way we work.
So just to confirm - the other software package doesn’t issue invoices for you, or record sales?
The reason I ask is because if this is the case, there’s no need to import it into QuickFile - you can just bulk record them as you would if you were running a shop or selling on eBay for example. You would just enter a bulk invoice on a regular basis (e.g. “Weekly Sales - w/e 16/03/2018”) and reference it back to your original records.
The bulk sale invoice would just be an invoice usually with one line, unless you have various VAT rates in use.
You could import these as separate invoices if you wish from a CSV file (e.g. daily or weekly sales imported on a monthly basis). You could even attach a copy of the backing data to the invoice itself so it’s easy to trace once the invoice has been created.
We have two articles around the basis of bulk logging sales which may be of interest:
I would like to add my support for this feature. I’ve just taken a contracting assignment and they would like detailed invoices broken down by hours per day per activity.
From my perspective, I think for an MVP version of this function, you wouldn’t necessarily need all the invoice header information if you had the upload on the invoice page and linked everything to that invoice:
Type - Time Event/Item
Item name
Description
Category - Chart of Accounts code
Unit Cost
Quantity
VAT Rate - I’m not VAT registered so don’t have this in my system but I’m guessing this applies to line items for VAT registered companies.
I did wonder about doing a lookup with the stored line items but I think that would be too complex given there is no enforcement of uniqueness and wouldn’t be essential anyway; users could easily export the line items from those screens if they wanted to make them match in their external system.
I’d like to add my vote for this function. I’d have thought it was pretty basic - how many invoices have a single item line? When I signed up for Quickfile it never occurrred to me that this wouldn’t be possible. Surely all it needs is for each item line to contain the same invoice number? This is standard functionality when using tabular files isn’t it? At least it’s something I’ve had to cater for frequently as a programmer. It’s a simple aggregation process
This isn’t something that effects me thankfully. But would someone consider making a marketplace app for this? I’m not sure how complecated it would be but maybe it would bridge a gap in the meantime?
This feature is definitely needed and not difficult to implement. Most all other accounting packages are offering this and without it you’ll likely lose customers.
I’m small fry so manually entering invoice details once a month isn’t too time consuming, however, my time tracking software has an export feature so I’d really like to be able to then import job details into quickfile to generate invoices automatically.
A quick search and I found a 2 min YouTube video showing how to do this using Quickbooks. Nice and simple. Just use a reference ID for all items in the same invoice.
Please talk to your developers and ask them nicely. Pretty please.