Moving your books into Caprastacks ERP
Caprastacks ERP brings your existing books over from a spreadsheet, in two steps: first your customers, suppliers and products, then your balances and stock as at one date. After the second step the books are yours, and you can invoice the next morning.
How do I move my existing books in?
Caprastacks ERP gives you three ways in, and most businesses need far less than they expect.
- Balances only — a fresh start. What each customer owes you, what you owe each supplier, the money you hold and the stock on your shelves, all as at one date. Nothing from before that date comes across. This is a complete migration on its own: from that day the books are live here.
- Your lists first, then your balances. The same, except you upload your customer, supplier and product lists beforehand so nothing is retyped. No money is involved in that step, so nothing in it can go wrong in your books — which is the point of doing it first.
- Type it in yourself. With a handful of accounts, skip the files entirely and enter your opening balances on the Opening balances screen.
Neither import step is locked behind the other. If you have already typed your products in by hand, Caprastacks ERP will not make you import a list you already have.
What comes across, and what does not?
Everything you need in order to trade from day one comes across. Your transaction history from before your start date does not — and that is a deliberate choice, explained below, rather than a gap being glossed over.
| What you have | What happens to it |
|---|---|
| Customers and suppliers | Comes across — with each name, whether they buy from you or sell to you, contact details, tax registration numbers, credit limit and payment terms. |
| Products and materials | Comes across — everything you hold stock of, raw materials and packaging included — with its unit, code, category, prices and tax rate. |
| What each customer owes you | Comes across — as one closing balance per customer, on your start date. |
| What you owe each supplier | Comes across — the same: one closing balance each. |
| Bank and cash balances | Comes across — as at the start date. |
| Loans, equipment, capital, other assets and liabilities | Comes across — under ten plain-English categories you choose from, so no account’s type is ever guessed from its name. |
| Stock on your shelves | Comes across — per product, with batch and expiry where you track them, what it cost you, and which warehouse it sits in. |
| Invoices, bills, payments and journals from before your start date | Stays behind — in the system you are leaving. The next section explains why, and it is the one worth reading. |
| Scanned documents and attachments | Stays behind — attach them here as you go. |
| Your staff and what each of them can see | Stays behind — you invite each person and choose what they reach. A minute each, and not something worth importing wrong. |
Do I lose my old invoice history?
No — it stays exactly where it is, in the system you are leaving. It does not come into Caprastacks ERP, and there is a specific reason we do not offer to bring it.
What most people have to hand is a party ledger — a statement of one customer or supplier with a running balance down the side. It looks like a list of transactions, but it is a report, and the same journal appears on two parties’ statements at once. Turn its rows into rows and you have counted a good number of them twice, in a way that no amount of correcting afterwards ever finds again. The closing balance at the bottom is exact. That is the figure Caprastacks ERP asks you for.
So keep your old system readable for as long as you need to look things up, and start clean here. What you gain is books whose every figure you can trace, from the first day.
What does the spreadsheet have to look like?
One row per record, in a blank template Caprastacks ERP hands you with the right columns for the step you are on. There is nothing to work out, and a few rules that exist because breaking them is how books get quietly wrecked.
- Dates as YYYY-MM-DD, and nothing else. Caprastacks ERP will not guess whether 03/04 is March or April. Guessing that is the quietest way there is to destroy a set of books.
- Amounts as plain numbers. 1250.50, not 1,250.50 and not with a currency symbol. A thousands separator read as a decimal point is wrong by a factor of a thousand and looks perfectly reasonable on the page.
- Names spelled as your old system spells them. Do not tidy them up. The second step refuses a stock line for a product it does not recognise, and tells you which one.
- Dr or Cr, copied from the bottom of your own ledger. Not “they owe me” — copying a figure is exact, working out what it implies is a judgement made hundreds of times over.
Do I have to reformat all of it by hand?
No. Caprastacks ERP writes the instructions for you, and you can hand them to an AI assistant along with whatever your old system gave you.
Each import screen offers a block of text generated from the same definition the importer itself reads — so the published instructions and the parser cannot disagree about a column. Paste it into whichever assistant you use, attach your export, and you get a file back in the right shape. It names your own units too, so you do not end up with “Piece” printed beside a quantity in a company that counts in “Pieces”.
It also carries the warning above about ledgers, because turning a statement into rows is the mistake an assistant reaches for if nobody stops it.
What if the numbers come in wrong?
You see them before they go in, and you can take them back out afterwards.
- A review screen first. Before anything is written, Caprastacks ERP shows what it read: how many customers and products, and the money — what customers owe you, what you owe suppliers, what your stock is worth. A count that differs is ordinary, because two rows for one customer in an old system become one here. Money that differs is not, and the import refuses to go in until it agrees with you.
- An undo afterwards. It removes only what the import created. A customer it matched to one you already had, or an account already in your chart, is left where it was — so you can fix the file and import again without losing anything you have been trading against since.
- Only the account owner can import. It is the largest single write in the product — thousands of entries at once — so it is never a permission a staff member can be given.
What does moving in cost?
Nothing. Import is part of Caprastacks ERP on every plan, and it works during the 30-day free trial — so you can bring your books in and open a trial balance before you have paid anything.
It goes out as easily as it came in: you can export everything yourself, whenever you like, on any plan. How to get your data out.
The full step-by-step, with the templates: bringing your old books in. Or start the trial and try it on a copy of your own data — see the plans.