Instructions from the BV Help file are in black. I have added notes in blue.

The Import Wizard allows you to import A/P transactions, A/R transactions, customer information, ship-to addresses, customer specific pricing, inventory information, unit of measure and pricing information, vendor information, remit-to addresses, and vendor specific pricing into BusinessVision. The import files must be in either in Excel (xls) or comma-delimited (csv) format.

Only the first tab of an Excel file is seen by the system, so you can have multiple tabs but only the first one is active for the import.

The Excel spreadsheet must be in a database type format, with one header row and no blank columns or rows.

To import information using the Import Wizard:

To be on the safe side, make a quick copy of your data folder (see separate article). Ensure all users are off the system, and keep them off until you are sure you imported the information correctly. If you click on ‘System Setup’ and get the message “The control file is busy” then you still have users on the system.

1. Select File > Import > Standard to display the import wizard.

2. Select the type of information you want to import from the Import module list.

3. Select either New import project or Open existing import project.

Existing projects must have exactly the same Excel file name and file location.

4. If this is an existing project, make a selection from the list and click Next. If this is a new import project, enter the Import project name and click Next. Select either Comma Separated values or Microsoft Excel as the type of file you want to work with, then enter or browse to the location of the import file.

5. In the last Import Wizard screen, match the entries under the Import File Field Name section to the BusinessVision equivalents. Click Map after selecting one entry in each section and the pair gets added to the list in the bottom section. To map one import file to multiple BusinessVision fields, hold the Ctrl key while selecting the BusinessVision equivalents.

6. Select the Date format used by the records you want to import. If the element imported does not have an associated date, the log in date for your session is used.

7. Continue to map import file names to BusinessVision names. If you want to remove a mapped pair from the bottom section, select the entry and click Undo. The two field names are then returned to the upper sections.

8. At any time during your mapping session, you can click Save project to preserve your work, or click Delete project to start over

There are required fields for many of the imports, such as Warehouse and Part Number to import inventory. If you are missing one of these fields, add it to the last column of your spreadsheet to as not to disturb your existing mapping.

Ensure your spreadsheet is open when you actually do the import. This will prevent BV from re-naming your spreadsheet and making it unrecognizable to Excel. If you miss this step and BV does rename it, you can rename it back to the original name by removing the extra characters from the file extension (in other words, change it back to .xls or .xlsx)

9. If you are done mapping, click Import to start the import process. If your import files are CSV files with header records that you don’t want to add to BusinessVision, select the Skip the first record checkbox before clicking Import.

10. Check the log file to see if any errors occurred during import or mapping by clicking View Log.

If you close the dialog before viewing the log file, you can view it in the data directory. Sort the file names by the most recent and you will see it there with a name such as ‘INV-Import log’. The data will be over ridden by the next import of the same type.

If you are using version 6.x of BVEssentials, you will have to do a re-load of the BVE Mongo data in order for it to show up in BVEssentials. (This is because Mongo is not updated automatically when items are imported into BV.) On the server, right click on the BVE icon in the bottom right corner of the screen to open the BVE Server Company List. Select the company where you imported the data and click on the blue arrows icon above. Select Reload Data. You can choose to reload just the module you updated (such as Inventory) in version 6.2 or above.