Loan Performer allows the importation of general ledger transactions. If you've been using another financial software product, and you'd like to import financial transactions from that product into Loan Performer, you can do so if that product allows you to export to a spreadsheet, dBase or text file. Financial transactions can be imported in three file formats, i.e., dBase, Microsoft Excel or Tab delimited text files. Each of these files has a standard file format on how data should be arranged.
You have to populate the templates with your own data for the financial transactions before you import it. You can refer to Savings Importation for further information regarding how the templates should be filled.
The Financial Transactions import templates can be downloaded from http://www.loanperformer.com/Download/import.rar or got from the Loan Performer working folder under the import file folder, e.g., "C:\LPF81204\External Files\Import English\" . It will be under the file name GL Import and it looks like the one below:
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Note also that when you hover the mouse over the column header, you will get more information about the column data.
Account No.: The account number has to correspond with an existing account in the Loan Performer database.
Transaction Day: This is the date when the transactions were carried out.
Importation of data from Microsoft Excel requires that either the date is entered just as a date, e.g., "02/02/2014" – which is only suitable if you have only one transaction per day – or that it is formatted as a date/time field as follows: dd/mm/yyyy:hh:mm:ss in order to allow the time differences.
Fill out and save the prepared template in a place where you can easily retrieve during importation of financial transactions.
Before you import financial transactions take note of the following
1. You must activate the start of the financial year before you can import transactions into the General Ledger. Transactions with dates that fall before the start of the financial year are not imported.
2. You cannot import accounts that are not defined in your chart of accounts. These transactions will be saved in the errors file with the reason why they were not processed (“Account Numbers not found in chart”).
3. The values for donorid, productid and branched fields have to exist in the database. If they are not, the transactions are not imported.
4. You must specify all 10 fields. If a numeric field has no value, you should put 0.
How to import financial transactions
To import financial transactions you go to Accounts/GL Transactions/Import Financial Transactions and a screen like the one below shows up:
Files of type: Specify the import file type in the files of type: box, e.g., "Microsoft Excel File".
Import file: Specify the full path to the file that should be imported, e.g., "C:\LPF814\EXTERNAL FILES\IMP": Alternatively double click in the Import file textbox to browse and select the file from a specified location.
Error File: Specify the name of the file to which errors that you incur during the importation will be written to,e.g., "GLError.Txt". This is a text file where the errors are stored for the un-processed data. You can either type a file name or double click in the field and choose an existing file. New errors will be appended to this file, it will not overwrite the old information.
Imported Files: This scroll window lists all previously imported files.
Reset: If you click on the reset button the imported file log and the scroll space will be cleared.
Replace the transaction code with a code generated by LPF: If you select this radio option then the system will disregard your imported codes and instead use those generated by LPF.
Import the transaction codes as they are and reset the internal LPF code: If you select this radio option then the system will maintain the imported codes from the imported data.
View: This button opens the selected import file and enables you to view contents of the Import file.
Click on the Import button to import the set financial transactions. The following screen shows up:
Click on the Yes command button to confirm the importation. A data importation confirmatory message will show up and the imported file will now be displayed in the Imported Files section. See below:
Importation involving Multi Currency
Loan Performer has incorporated a functionality to import General Ledger (GL) transactions across different currencies. You will still have to register exchange rates for different periods before you can carry out any such importation as demonstrated below:
The GL accounts below are of different currencies (540011 and 126012 foreign and local respectively) the importation is in foreign currency (USD). While the dollar account (Foreign Currency GL) will maintain the imported amount, the local currency account will have the amount converted based on the above exchange rate.
The above report shows account 126012 a local currency account was credited with import template amount of UGX 17,500,000 an equivalent of $7,000 in foreign currency at an exchange rate of 2500 for a dollar. While GL account 540011 a dollar account was debited with the original template amount of 7,000 dollars .