Sage™ Accounting import errors: contacts and bank statements
Sage Accounting's CSV imports are strict about headings, column order and what a column may contain. A file that looks fine in a spreadsheet can still be refused.
Bank statement imports
Sage Accounting reads a bank statement CSV as either three columns (date, description, amount) or four (date, description, money in, money out). The usual failures are the wrong column order, a blank description, and separate Debit and Credit columns where a single signed Amount was expected. Opening and closing balance rows left in the data are read as transactions.
Check by hand: confirm the number of columns matches the form you are importing, keep one amount per row with money out as a negative number, and delete balance rows and report titles around the data.
Contacts imports
A contacts file needs the headings Sage expects, a name on every row, and values within the field lengths. A file over about half a megabyte may need splitting. Fields over their length may be truncated rather than rejected, which is the dangerous case: the import succeeds and a contact name is quietly cut short.
Why a spreadsheet makes it worse
- Numbers stored as text will not sum or sort, and amounts with currency symbols or thousands separators are not numbers to an importer.
- Dates read with the wrong regional setting swap day and month without any warning.
- Stray and non-breaking spaces stop values matching.
Bringing a CSV into Excel: use Data › From Text/CSV, then in the preview choose Transform Data and set date and code columns to Text, or use the Text Import Wizard (Data › Get Data › Legacy Wizards › From Text (Legacy), if your Excel shows it) and choose Text for those columns. Opening a CSV directly lets Excel guess, and it guesses wrong on dates and codes.
Sage changes its import templates from time to time, and several details could not be confirmed against a live Sage company when this add-in was built. Where that is so, Import Cleaner for Sage explains the problem and leaves your cells alone.
Check the file before you trust it
Import Cleaner for Sage scans a Sage export, or a sheet you are about to import, and explains every finding. The full scan, every explanation and Undo are free, and your data stays on your machine.
About Import Cleaner for Sage — the Excel add-in, coming soon to Microsoft AppSource. Also available for Google Sheets™.