It seems like for what it costs Sage 50 Complete Accounting 2013 should be much more functional.

I have changed the organizational structure of a company we just purchased.  Due to the new organizational structure and the fact that the previous owner had a dizzying array of overlapping and unused accounts, custom forms, reports, etc. etc. we decided to create a new company file from scratch, with new EINs, and start from a clean slate.  I would like to import customers and vendors from the old company, there are many hundreds of customers, and quite a few vendors.

Unfortunately, when I export the customer list from the old company it will not import into the new company.  Same version of Sage, same computer, same selections in the Select Import/Export dialogue.  It seems to not like the format of the data in certain cells.  It hangs up at every date field (not the header row, the records) then it hangs up at TRUE/FALSE fields (if the data is FALSE, it does not seem to have trouble accepting TRUE), it hangs up on numeric fields (such as G/L account numbers), and on and on.   The Import/Export feature is plainly not functional.  It continually stops with the error, "An error occurred importing the file \\path\filename.CSV This happened on: Line Number: 2 Filed Name: xxxxx".

I have tried comparing the data types in the .csv files and found no solution.  If I leave dates in the Excel serial format it does not work, if I convert the dates to a date format (mm/dd/yyyy, m/d/yy, etc.) it does not work.  If I convert the data to a date format and then back to text (so they display as mm/dd/yyyy, etc.) it does not work.  If there is any data in a date field at all it will not work.  What's worse, the import feature will not just skip the unreadable data, it causes it to exit the whole import.  So I can't even just fill in some fields of missing data, it brings in zero records.  I tried de-selecting the fields in the import tool that are causing trouble with the import, but It is an iterative process, each time finding new fields that will not import.  When I got to about thirty fields I gave up, this is too much data to have to manually enter.

If I have to enter all customers, vendors, and inventory items by keyboard I think I will have to just convert to another accounting system that actually works.  I can't imagine investing this kind of time in such a menial task, then having this sort of problem at every turn from here on out.  If Sage has an answer for this I am very anxious to hear it, but after reading through these forums I am not encouraged that they can make their product work.