Splasm Software Discussions

Hello and thanks for a great program - the first accounting prog I can make head or tail of.

My accountant uses MYOB. I send him my Checkbook bank downloads in QIF format. In the 'description' column I write what the expenditure was for.

When he opens the files he cannot see the 'description' column. Am I doing anything wrong? Is there a fix?

thanks

Mark Davis

Mark:

CheckBook places each Entry's Description in the exported QIF file's Memo field. We're not sure about how MYOB interprets QIF files but we're pretty certain Memo is the correct field for CheckBook to use. Maybe we can test this with a demo of MYOB. Can you tell us the full product name and version your accountant is using?

_________________
Keith Gugliotto
Primordial Sea Captain
Splasm Software
https://www.splasm.com

Thanks Keith. My accountant uses MYOB 'Accounting Plus' v15. The description is not totally missing - it pops up in the To/From column after a semi colon.... but not in its own column. It is not an urgent matter as he has found a work around by opening in Microsoft Money. But if you do have another solution I'd be happy to try it out.

I have another newbie question which you may be able to help with if I can adequately describe it.

I would like to have two or three seperate versions of Checkbook to work with rather than having all accounts in the one window.

i.e one icon that opens up Checkbook Personal and another that opens up Checkbook Business etc. Can I do this??


regards

Mark Davis

I apologize, Mark - we missed your second question. It sounds like you need to group Accounts into separate document files, which isn't something CheckBook is prepared to do at this point. CheckBook's data file is stored deep in your home folder, where it is automatically accessed and maintained by CheckBook and is, for the most part, a hands-off affair for users. We'll consider supporting multiple document files to provide the functionality you're looking for.

Regarding MYOB, we installed MYOB Premier Accounting v15, which appears to have replaced the old "Plus", and tested importing an export from CheckBook. The regular import feature would not accept CheckBook's QIF because CheckBook does not export an Account list along with the actual Accounts and their Entries. We've always felt the Accounts list served no purpose - the data in each Accounts list entry is identical to the data in the actual Accounts elsewhere in the QIF file. Now we see that at least one or two financial packages expect the Accounts list, probably as a table of contents, instead of parsing the file and constructing a list of Accounts - as they will have to do in any event when they import transactions and decide in which Account to store them. Without the Accounts list, these applications seem to think the incoming QIF is a statement file rather than a complete financial history. We can look at adding an Accounts list to CheckBook's QIF export to make this easier for users who work in multiple finance packages.

Regardless, we were able to import CheckBook's QIF into a bank register in MYOB and the Description came in correctly. I wonder if there's something about the way you're entering Descriptions in CheckBook that we're not taking into account during the export, and that's causing CheckBook to output QIF in a way that MYOB does not expect. The way to test that is for you to prepare a test Account in CheckBook, fill in some dummy Entries the way you normally do, export to QIF, test the QIF with your accountant to make sure the Description field does not import correctly, then send the QIF to us so we can examine it byte by byte to develop some ideas about what could be throwing off MYOB. At the same time, it would be helpful if you could send us the exact data you used to fill out your dummy Entries. You can send the QIF file and the dummy data to support@splasm.com.

_________________
Keith Gugliotto
Primordial Sea Captain
Splasm Software
https://www.splasm.com