Importing Sales Orders - Unit Price and Amount are coming in as negative values rather than positive values, and what is the Number of Distributions value used for on a Sales Order?

I am new to Sage 50 and trying to help this small business to import sales order information.  I started by identifying the fields that I thought we needed and then I exported that so that I had everything in the right sequence.  I don't see a place when entering a sales order manually, to enter a value for Number of Distributions, yet when importing, an error message told me that I needed this field.  I just added it and included a default value of 1.  Do you see any issue with this?  Then secondly, my values in the csv file for Amount and Unit Price were positive, but when imported they were switched to negative.  Any idea what causes that?  Certainly I could change my values in the spreadsheet to be negative, but I would rather understand why this is happening and fix the root cause.

Thank you for any insight.

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    Hi Meredith,

    I hope you got this all squared away. I plan to write up more details on this on a blog entry - perhaps create a video - as I feel that Sage's documentation is... vague.

    After several calls to Sage, getting a manager/higher level tech on the line, and some trial and error, I have sales orders importing correctly using CSV files. I am thankful for their support, even if they kept talking about not supporting "3rd party integration". My retort was, better documentation and we aren't having this conversation. But... c'est la vie.

    For us, the use case is that we (my client) has a new B2B eCommerce platform. We are using the ODBC drivers and connect/retrieve Sage data directly into Excel - so we have a master sheet of customers (for customer ID and other things like shipping, terms, etc.) and a master list of products (Item ID, Description), etc.

    • Retrieve orders via Power Automate via our ECommerce API
    • Place orders (raw data) into an Excel file
    • Run Excel VBA that connects/matches eCommerce Customer ID to Sage Customer ID, eCommerce SKUs to Sage Item IDs
    • Use an Excel Sage Sales Journal import template and places the required data into that sheet
    • Saves the sheet as a CSV
    • Import into sage

     With the ODBC connection, we are able to include the customer's terms, shipping method, tax code, notes, etc.

    Regarding negative/positive in unit price and amount, when importing a sales order, make the amounts negative to create a positive amount on the invoice lines and totals.

    Why you ask?

    It has to do with double-entry accounting, credits being debits and debits being credits, or common core math... or perhaps something to do with quantum entanglement or string theory. In the immortal words of Joe Dirt, "...might as well ask why is a tree good? Why is the sunset good?..." (I can't put the rest of the quote)

    Regarding Number of Distributions and SO/Proposal Distribution

    • Number of Distributions: The total number of lines in a given order. If you have 3 lines, all three lines will have the same number, 3.
    • SO/Proposal Distribution: The individual line items for an order. 1, 2, 3 (in the above example)
      We were initially keeping the Sales Order/Proposal # field blank and including the line numbers ensured that multiple orders to the same customers in a single import file created new/individual orders.

    If you want/need any additional assistance, I'm happy to offer what I can.

    Thanks,
    Matthew Moran

  • 0 in reply to Matthew Moran

    Thank you Matthew, and yes, we have been able to successfully import order information as a CSV file.  I am helping a very small company, so much of what we do is manual (even the collection of the order information) but I have found that importing definitely beats retyping a sales order (on excel) to create an invoice in Sage.

    I'm still baffled by the need to load the unit price and extended amounts as negatives in order for them to show as positive values :-) but am not losing sleep over it.

    I appreciate your offer and will reach out of we get stuck.  Thank you again,

    Meredith Koerner

    LT's Inc.

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  • 0 in reply to Matthew Moran

    Thank you Matthew, and yes, we have been able to successfully import order information as a CSV file.  I am helping a very small company, so much of what we do is manual (even the collection of the order information) but I have found that importing definitely beats retyping a sales order (on excel) to create an invoice in Sage.

    I'm still baffled by the need to load the unit price and extended amounts as negatives in order for them to show as positive values :-) but am not losing sleep over it.

    I appreciate your offer and will reach out of we get stuck.  Thank you again,

    Meredith Koerner

    LT's Inc.

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