If you want to learn how to bring in historical data, quickly bring in donations from a different payment processor, track more of your contacts, or get caught up on your bookkeeping faster because you fell behind, then you’re in the right place.
In this article we’re going to look at:
- Importing Transactions
- Importing Donations
- Importing Journal Entries
- Importing Contacts
How to Import Transactions
If you have fallen behind in entering your bank transactions, you may want to save time in data entry by importing them all at once. Before starting, make sure you update your chart of accounts to include all of the accounts you may need, and set up your tags if you use them. Not sure what tags are? Here is a quick resource on How to Use Tags.
Important note: Importing transactions into the register will not track donations for contribution statements for your donors. To do that, you need to import your donations through the Donation section, as shown below.
Here is a quick walkthrough of how to import your transactions:
Need a more in-depth look and step-by-step instructions? Check out the article Importing Past Transactions.
How to Import Donations
If you need to get caught up on entering donations or wish to bring in donations from another giving platform, you can import a batch of donations using an Excel template. Importing your donations into the Donation section of Aplos will ensure you are tracking each donation by Donor and using the correct Purpose. If you desire, you can also create a deposit of these donations to also track them in the Accounting.
Here is a quick walkthrough of how to import donations in Aplos:
Need a more in-depth info? Check out this article about contributions and deposits.
How to Import Journal Entries
The Journal Entry import tool is helpful for any user who needs to import data from another system such as a payroll provider, bill payment software, or expense reimbursement system. It’s easy to take your exported data, format it to the provided Aplos import template, and import it to your Journal Entry import page.
Here is a quick walkthrough of how to import your Journal Entries:
Not as comfortable with debits and credits and just need to import income and expense transactions into a Check Register? Use the Manual Import tool which will import transactions to one of your register accounts. You can see more about that tool from this guide.
How to Import Contacts
Adding New Contacts
If you’re setting up your Aplos account and already have a list or file of your contacts and their information, you can use the import tool to upload and easily add those contacts all at once. All contacts you import will be created as a new contact record. Then you can run the duplicate finder tool to merge them with your existing database if they were already in Aplos.
Updating Existing Contacts
If you already have a number of contacts in your Aplos database and wish to update them, such as adding them to a list, doing a bulk update to a field, or adding updated addresses, export your Aplos Contact List and include the Contact ID field and any fields you wish to update. When you reimport your list, any contact with a Contact ID will be matched and updated with any changes you made.
Here is a quick walkthrough of how to import your contacts:
Contact Import Errors
A common error you might receive is unaccepted characters in the email address field. The import process does not allow you to import multiple email addresses in a single column, so if you have two email addresses listed, an error message will appear. You’ll need to edit your import file and re-import the file.
A Note on Duplicates
The Importer will only update an existing contact in your file if you include the Aplos Contact ID. So you may find imported contacts that already exist in your Contact List in Aplos. If you happen to find duplicates, you can check out this article on How to Merge Contacts.
Need more in-depth info on importing your contacts? Check out this article for step-by-step instructions to Import Contacts.
