Hello,
I just spent more than 20 hours importing 5 years of entries from a csv file, that involved me checking and renaming most of the entries.
Only to realize at the end that I have put all my expenses wrongly as “credit” because I didn’t set them with a negative sign in the csv…
I know it’s a stupid mistake, I don’t know accounting and didnt know credit is the opposite of expense. Is there anyway I can mass-invert the sign of those “cleared” entries at once? I really don’t want to have to repeat the 20 hours of work again… I would rather give up on recording expenses now that my records are all messed up.
Thanks a lot for your help
Kelvin
I don’t know of a way to do what you’re asking (the Admins may have an answer) but may I make two possible suggestions as a work-around if not?
One possible option: Export the data you have TODAY (with all the signs reversed and revisions you’ve made) into a spreadsheet. Add a column to multiply the withdrawals by (-1) and replace the erroneous fields with that number (you’ll have to cut-and-paste Values, not Formulas). Then once that’s saved in like three different places, lol, delete the transactions from Goodbudget and re-import them, now with all your changes and the correct signs.
Another option: Leave the transactions as-is with the knowledge that they’re all inverted, but change the balances of the accounts to reflect double the inverse (I’d use the Sum function in the .csv spreadsheet you were working on). Unless you use reports that span the gap between the imported transactions and anything new, I think you’ll just find that reports on old data are “backwards” but new reports are clean.
For example, you import old transactions that are legitimately $-150 and $250 but with the signs reversed. This should mean your balance is $100 but instead it will show $-100. Just increase the balance of that account by $200 (the “double inverse”) and your balance will be correct.
If you run a report of, say, grocery expenses in January, you’ll find that you spend $+500 which of course makes no sense, but whether the signs are + or - the total will be the same as long as ALL the signs (deposits and withdrawals) are reversed.
Before you try either of these, wait for the other forum folks and the Admins to chime in. I’ve never done this, so I don’t know if there’s a hole in my logic but there are a couple other power users who will chime in if they see any flaws (the one I’m most concerned about is whether re-importing an exported file will allocate transactions to envelopes appropriately). And hopefully, the Admins will be able to find an easy fix that bypassess these workarounds entirely!
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Hi Tiffany, thank you for the great ideas!
The first idea is clever. I tried to see if it works, but finally I think the bottle neck is that no matter what I do, the import tool will require me to manually drag-and-drop every single line in the imported file, and to press OK
With thousands of entries, this will take forever. And then I still have the problem of not being able to import envelop information, so I will have to assign them one by one from scratch.
(The second solution would not work in my case because I had most of my other transactions that already existed in the database, which were input correctly. So only some of the entires, the “cleared” ones that were the result of the import.)