| Purpose & Benefits |
|---|
| This function lets you import/update “Original”, “Future”, “Revised” or All these types of Budget figures into TAS so that you can use them in the TAS Financial Reporting function 142. Most live accounting systems will have at least 100 NL Accounts – this can double or more with multiple Departments – and with 3 types of budget for each, plus each in turn having figures in 12 accounting periods (or 13 in some cases), the number of budget figures to be entered/updated can quickly reach at least 4,000 (112 x 3 x 12 = 4,032). That is a lot of manual keying work in TAS function 111 (Maintain Chart of Accounts), apart from the possibility of errors. You may use an external system to create, calculate and update your Budgets, such as Excel or Sage WinForecast Professional, and to produce the required ASCII CSV text files – then 100’s of transactions are processed accurately in seconds. Thus, you can achieve major savings because the expensive, time-consuming and error-prone tasks of manually re-keying this data to the TAS Nominal Ledger are automated. |
Important
The file containing the budget figure records for import must be output from your third party software as a Comma Separated Variable file (CSV) as ‘BUDGET.DAT’, e.g. for a default single user PC it could be: C:\TASData\Company001\Accounts\BUDGET.DAT. The order, format and size of the fields/columns for each record are critical for the import to succeed. Full details of the current file specifications, which must be used to output your data from your third party software, are documented separately in TAS Data Transfer File Specs which you can obtain from the Infoplex website, together with a TAS Data Transfer Toolkit containing sample files. It is crucial that you and/or your third party software provider follow these specifications. The specifications also give you useful information about how the program behaves if the import file contains blank or invalid data in the various fields/columns. This software has comprehensive checks to ensure that an import will succeed only if all the critical data is correct. A text log file is created during the import/update process and this can be viewed and/or printed afterwards.
When the Budget Import form appears, the progress bar displays the number of transaction line items found in the import CSV file.
Select whether you want to import/update Original , Future , Revised or All of these types of Budget figures into TAS; it is worth noting that your import CSV file can contain one, two or all three types of budget record. Click the Import button to proceed.
When processing has finished the progress bar gives you a message.
Click Exit to return to the main menu. The budget items imported, together with any errors encountered, are recorded in the ASCII text Log file called “BudErr.LOG”, which you can view and print using the View Text Files function from the File Menu.
To troubleshoot any errors, you can use Troubleshooting ASCII CSV File Data Errors.