Failed import of items (Warning 58)

[Mark9]

Despite many attempts over the last four business days, I've been unable to cleanly upload new items to AccountRight, getting "Warning 58: Income account invalid; item may not be sold." every time. In all cases, the log (see attached) returns the income account number as 108 when it is 41100.

The warning has been the same regardless of whether I use comma- or tab-delimited data, whether I export from Access or Excel (or Notepad or Notepad++ for that matter). I've attached a copy of the data (MYOBItemUploadFamily.txt).

On Friday I contacted support and after 90 minutes was put through to a MYOB representative who asked me to email him a copy of my data. He later emailed back a revised copy (see attached ITEM for Mark.txt) of the file and asked me to upload it. This too failed in exactly the same way. Since I reported this failure to him, and then followed up the next day with another email, he has not responded.

I have since tried to upload in all .csv and .txt export formats available to Excel, with the same result in every case.

[gavin12345]

Hi @Mark9 

There are numerous forum posts about import issues with AR2020 - MYOB made some crazy changes that broke things - not sure why or what they were trying to do. Nor were these fixed with AR2020.2.

One solution provided by a moderator may help here. The order of your fields in the import file now seems to matter. Try exporting an Item and then use the export to copy and paste from your import file into the export file using the headers. Also include all the headers even if you don't use certain columns, and leave them in the order that they are.

Let us know how you get on.

Regards

Gavin

[Mark9]

Gavin

In short, this worked, laborious though it may be.

What I actually did:

1. Export all items, with all fields, from MYOB to file ITEM.txt.
2. Open ITEM.txt in LibreOffice and remove all lines containing items, leaving headers/field names.
3. Manually copy and paste my import data into the LibreOffice worksheet one field at a time.
4. Save the worksheet in csv format.
5. Import into MYOB.

The result of the above was: Warning 240: Price Level A, Quantity Break 1 not equal to Base Selling Price; Bases Selling Price substituted. For peace of mind, I then did another test, having also copied the data in the Selling Price field to the Price Level A, Qty Break 1 field to defuse warning 240. the result of this second attempt was an import with zero warnings. Good result. Thanks for the tip.

However, since I want to automate as much as I can of this process, I will experiment further to see whether the steps and data requirement can be simplified. If anything significant turns up I will let you know.

Cheers, Mark.

[Mark9 · Accepted solution]

Further investigation revealed:

• unused fields can be dispensed with.
• the blank line at the top of the export file can be dispensed with.
• identical field names are not required (Access, for example, does not permit . in field names).
• a freshly-generated import file (i.e., not one first exported from MYOB) works just as well.
• some reordering of fields is permissible.

On the last point, I moved the field that appeared to be the cause of my original import problems, Income Acct, to the far right, without error or warning on the subsequent import. However, since field order is not an issue for me, I didn't bother testing further to find out exactly whether some adverse ordering of fields was what caused the original problem.

I've been as explicit as I can about this issue, in the hope that in the absence of explanation from MYOB others don't waste a week trying to figure out what to do.

[Fiona_Brown]

Thanks Mark!

That solved my import problem into a new datafile.

Cheers

Fiona

[Mark9]

Curiously, when I tried to import items again recently I got a similar warning concerning supposedly invalid account numbers (Warning 59 this time). Again, MYOB seemed to be replacing my account number wth one of its own (I think it was 110 instead of 51210). I managed to solve this manifestation of the problem by reordering fields, putting the account number field at the extreme right.

[gavin12345]

Hi @Mark9 

This is one of the weird changes I was referring to.  When an import fails, instead of providing the value you entered into a field, MYOB shows the Record ID of that field. This makes it very difficult to understand and re-input. In the past, a user would simply edit the log file with the correction and re-import just the failed records. 

In your case account 51210 has a Record ID of 110 - this is not what caused the import to fail. Account 51210 does exist however it may not be the correct account type. Or the error might be caused by incorrect mapping or ordering.

Either way very difficult to diagnose and solve - about time MYOB fixed this.

Regards

Gavin

[Irina-san]

Many thanks, @Mark9 , for your post, I have experienced the same problem trying to import items and getting failure with all three accounts I put initially in the left part of the upload format, as it was presented in the Clearwater sample. I tried to change cells to text-general, inserting and deleting dash in accounts numbers and making other useless attempts before I came across your post. Astonishingly, moving all three types of accounts to the very right of the table helped. By the way, despite MYOB guidance says dash in the account number is permissible, in case of 2020.04 it returns an error.

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@Mark9 wrote:

Curiously, when I tried to import items again recently I got a similar warning concerning supposedly invalid account numbers (Warning 59 this time). Again, MYOB seemed to be replacing my account number wth one of its own (I think it was 110 instead of 51210). I managed to solve this manifestation of the problem by reordering fields, putting the account number field at the extreme right.

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