Importing invoices

[Mike Evans]

On Mon, 16 Jan 2017 00:14:06 -0800 (PST)
GoodNamesGone <abry at gyofukan.com> wrote:

> Really, does it have to be THAT complicated? And don't give me the "it's an
> open source - therefore deal with it" argument. - because, maybe give it a
> tier - I will certainly pay for it rather than spend weeks trying to figure
> this thing out, or spending 1.5 hours a week manually typing in invoice
> details - that is 72 hours a year!!
> If one wants to import 3 columns from excel into the invoice section,
> GNUCash will crash. That's ridiculous.
> The parsing/import does NOT work. I even hired a guy - and he couldn't get
> it to work. So, is there an alternative import?
> 


I'm sorry to hear about your troubles importing invoice data.

To be fair the actual import is not complicated, it's getting the data into an importable format that's a little more involved. The problem is that invoices are complicated beasts with many variables that cannot be guessed by GnuCash The fact that many people do use the importer successfully demonstrates that it does work, provided that the import data are correct.

It will not import a 3 column Excel sheet but it certainly shouldn't crash. The data format is demonstrated in the documentation and there are certainly more that 3 columns involved.

https://www.gnucash.org/docs/v2.6/C/gnucash-guide/import-invoices.html

A typical CSV import line looks like:

BL-0071,,000013,,,,BC108 NPN GP TRANSISTOR,,Expenses:Materials General,20,0.16,,,,,,,,,,,
Yes, there are a lot of commas but there's only 6 that have to contain data.

It should never crash GnuCash however, and that is clearly worthy of a bug report. See 
https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Bugzilla and 
https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/FAQ#Q:_I_think_I_found_a_bug._How_do_I_report_it.3F
for how to report a bug.

Please supply a sample of the data that causes the crash and if possible an empty account file to test it on. You can export an empty account tree with File->Export->export Accounts.

Mike E

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