Scribe Import Amex Download
Our client pays most of their bills by credit card. They are an online business. Most of their vendors are online vendors and need prepayment. Also the top executives are doing much of the purchasing, so the accounting department is an “afterthought”. American Express does a mediocre job of categorizing the charges; therefore the bookkeeper needs to manually re-categorize the charges after importing to Quicken.
They have outgrown Quicken and are moving to GP. So we set up their vendors with explicit GL purchase accounts. Now we can import the Amex file and automatically distribute the purchases correctly. Also, we can pay them off in one motion, leaving the only payable charge against the AMEX card, which points to the American Express vendor.
Here is the AMEX download file
For this demo, we cleaned out the GL, so the import will be obvious.
The vendors need to be set up with a Purchase GL Account:
Once the Scribe import of the Amex file is done, an unposted batch is created in GP, so we can review for accuracy, before posting:
The Payables were all imported, leaving only American Express with a balance:
The only vendor who is owed is American Express:
Posting to GL shows the Payables Transactions:
And their offset distributions:
The summary Trial Balance shows the totals by GL account:
It was a bit tricky to import the Payable Transactions and pay them off with the Amex card simultaneously. We needed 2 new, unique, transaction numbers created by GP. We also had to skip over Amex payments that were recorded in the import file, because those had previously been entered into the accounting system by the bookkeeper.
Key to assigning correct GL accounts is using a Scribe Lookup function, to find that GL account index in the Vendor Master table (pm00200).
We could have tried to do this in SQL code or writing .NET code to the Dynamics eConnect API, but Scribe makes it easier, by allowing a drag-and-drop interface, with some scripting. The API is under the hood of their GP Adapter.
