How Excel Importer Helped Strategic Solutions Save Their Client Time When Importing Into Business Central

More about Strategic Solutions Northwest.

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Recently, Lori realized there was a gap in how the built-in Business Central tools import large volumes of data. She could see issues with it during the rollout of Business Central for a major US restaurant brand with multiple retail systems. Each day, the accounting team must upload thousands of GL entries into their Business Central account quickly.

She explains:

“Many clients must import large volumes of data into Business Central, often GL journals. We found two issues when we reviewed the ‘edit in excel’ function inside Business Central. The main issue was the time it would take to run the uploads. You edit each journal and then the related batch name. But if you have 1000 different journals and batch names, users can’t edit 1000 different templates to import the data. We had to offer a better solution for our client.”

The second issue related to the stability of this function – it was a little more temperamental than Lori and the client were prepared to accept.

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Excel Importer comes out on top during speed tests

Lori and her team checked out AppSource (the Microsoft marketplace for apps for Business Central and other tools) for a solution.

Lori found two apps to evaluate – Excel Importer and one other. She compared all options to the built-in functionality in Business Central, manually making changes to an Excel file and then uploading it. All solutions were evaluated for speed and ease of use.

To make things comparable, Lori uploaded the same data each time with only herself working in Business Central, rather than several users creating contention issues. She had a large standard journal file with over 2700 entries to upload.

The built-in ‘edit in Excel’ function took about 4 - 5 minutes to upload the journals – however, this excluded the manual edits to the templates needed each time. This method would have been very tedious, time-consuming and frustrating for the user to have to edit or find the right journal batch template in a list of hundreds. Additionally, this option did result in accidentally overlaying an existing journal batch when the wrong template was chosen.

Copying and pasting the lines from Excel into Business Central was another option. Lori copied a template from the Business Central setup and copied and pasted the content into it. The large load test took 13 – 14 minutes, including all the manual edits to the file.

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Finally, the results from the app evaluations

Excel Importer works with any journal/batch from predefined templates. It loads large journals quickly and is more efficient than the built-in Business Central functionality, as you don’t need to make any manual edits. The total time taken was 4 – 5 minutes.

Lori also noticed that the Excel Importer uploads happen inside a journal batch – which is a big plus in her book as it eliminates the chance of someone overlaying someone else’s data. Another big plus’ for Excel Importer was how easy it is to use and its consistency.

The other app evaluated took 13 - 14 minutes to upload the data. With each upload taking such a long time, Lori had concerns that there would be contention issues.

After the testing, Lori knew she’d found the best solution for her customer – Excel Importer. Lori got in touch with Theta, Excel Importer maker, and started a conversation about partnering and how to support her customer best.

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A partnership packed with support

After running the test, everything moved very quickly.

Lori contacted Theta directly to see if they could improve the error handling on Excel Importer. The support team at Theta made improvements within a week.

This attitude to partnerships and app improvements impressed Lori:

“Working with an app partner with a responsive, smart team gave me huge confidence in my recommendation. We’ve rolled out Excel Importer to our client – and they love it. Having this support from day 1 has helped make the rollover to our client’s new Business Central ERP easier for all concerned. With a few simple templates, they are underway using Excel Importer.”‍

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Results table

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