Our company run three nurseries. Every month I input manually around 150 invoices for them to be printed out and given to parents.Each child/customer has its Account reference. The invoice type is service and it will have 5 lines with 3 different nominal codes. The invoice ref. numbers are generated automatically by Sage. I know that I can Import Invoices from Excel using Audit Trial format. Not sure that this will suit my situation.
Are you using a version of Sage which offers memorised transactions? If so, you might be able to memorise each invoice, giving it the parent name as the template name, and then recall it each month, changing the date and invoice number.
Thank you for your reply.
All the invoices that have ever been created are stored on an Invoice list in Customer ledger. What I am doing at the moment is duplicating an invoice from previous month for each child changing month and amount as it varies from month to month depending on extra hours/lunches/etc. The source information for billing is a an Excel billing spreadsheet that I receive on 20th of each month from nursery managers. I may be asking too much from Sage 50, just thought may be there is a way of uploading/importing information from this spread sheet automatically on sage.
As far as I am aware there's a function like that on Xero.
Unfortunately, yes - you are asking too much of it.
Depending on which version you have, there is the option of setting up recurring invoices, but you will still have to manually change the same information that you are changing now when duplicating previous invoices.
You can, as you mention, import invoice data into Sage, but that's simply the "bottom line" (so to speak) of the invoices; the information about the invoices needed for the sales ledger, rather than the actual invoices themselves; you can't import the data (AFAIK) to then produce the invoices.
(In theory - although this isn't something I've tried - it might be possible to 'fudge' this and produce actual invoices from the sales ledger, by creating a day book report that shows one transaction per page and is laid out like an invoice, but that would only be very simple invoices, and only suitable where there is just one item on each invoice; given your description of the information on your invoices, that wouldn't be suitable for you.)
It sounds to me that a better solution for you would be some kind of mail merge based on the data in the Excel spreadsheet that you are starting with - firstly to produce/print the invoices, and secondly to create the CSV file to then import into Sage's sales ledger.
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Vince M Hudd - Soft Rock Software
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Thank you for taking time to reply. We have been doing mail merge as you suggested but want to get away from using various packages and only use Sage. I am glad my understanding of Sage (implemented the thing from scratch on my own) was decent enough to guess my wish never to be materialised. Oh well I suppose we have to consider ourselves lucky we don't have to do double entry manually or use abacus any more. Lol
The memorised invoices system is sage just doesn't seem to be good enough. I have some customers who bemoan it for missing out invoices, being a pain to set up and cancel and so on.
I have a tool that is used by a company selling music lessons to schools, they generate the initial invoices in Excel as a big spreadsheet which is then imported into Sage as multiple identical 2 line invoices, which they then email out. I might be able adapt it to your needs.
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