Importing and migrating

Sooner or later somebody hands you fifty thousand rows. The wrong way to handle that is to read them through an AI model: it costs the client real money, and a model reading row forty thousand can drift into a different interpretation than it had at row two — producing a ledger that is plausible and wrong. Zeno splits the job. The agent works out the shape from a sample of about fifteen rows. The engine applies that shape to every row deterministically: exact decimal money, one date parser, and a warning for each row it could not read.

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Look before you read

Start by inspecting the file. That costs almost nothing and answers the only questions that matter up front: what format it is, and — for a spreadsheet or CSV — its headers, a handful of sample rows, and which columns actually parse as dates and amounts. Some formats describe their own columns, and the inspection says so: A file already sitting in the inbox can be imported where it is. There is no need to re-upload it.

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A spreadsheet or CSV

Work out from the sample what each column means, then hand over a column map. Required: a date, an amount, and a kind — one kind throughout, or a column naming the kind per row for a mixed register. Optional: the counterparty, account, item, quantity, class, memo, reference number, due date, and a source reference. Values the file does not carry at all can be supplied as constants. Two options are worth knowing:

• groupBy — when several rows make one document. A bill register keyed by bill number is many lines and few bills; without this, every row becomes its own transaction.
• invertAmounts — when the export signs money the other way round.

The column map is shown to the reviewer as part of the plan, so a column read as the wrong thing is caught before anything posts, not after.

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A QuickBooks Desktop file

An IIF export becomes a plan in one step. IIF has a published grammar, so it is parsed by a parser rather than read by a model. The name lists in the file — accounts, customers, vendors, items, classes, terms, payment methods — become the plan’s lists section, and the transactions become its entries. That is what makes a migration reviewable as one thing: the chart of accounts, the customer list, and the history that references them arrive together, and a reviewer can strike a proposed name as readily as a proposed entry. Where QuickBooks Online has no equivalent at all — inventory adjustments, assemblies, sales orders, item receipts, price levels — the import says so by name rather than approximating something.

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Dates

An import is historical by nature, so both import paths default to a migration date policy: far-past dates are expected, and their notes are downgraded to information rather than warnings. Ask for the standard policy when you want old and far-future dates to warn — which is right for a file that is supposed to be current.

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It is still a plan

Nothing above writes to QuickBooks. Each of these produces an ordinary plan, and it goes through plan, review, apply, reverse like everything else: somebody reads the approval table, approves it in their own words, and the run that applies it returns the id that undoes it. On a fifty-thousand-row import, review the shape rather than each line: the totals by kind, the date range, the count of blocked names. The plan renders both.

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When an import went wrong

If a batch posted and should not have, reverse its run — that is the first answer and usually the only one needed. For everything else — duplicate bills from two different imports, a wrong-month batch, a mass recode — there is a bulk cleanup plan: void, delete or correct many documents already in QuickBooks as one approval table and one reversible run. Each target is pinned to the revision it carries at planning time, so a document somebody edited between the approval and the apply is refused rather than acted on. Every action is journalled with the document’s pre-image before anything happens, so the run reverses: a void or an edit is restored onto the same document, a deleted one can only come back under a new id, and the reversal says which it did. The tools behind this page are listed under importing a file and correcting what is already posted.