Excellent Importer
Excellent Importer is an extension for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central that allows you to import data from Microsoft Excel. Excellent Importer will enable you to import Excel data in its original format without altering the file structure. Excellent Importer helps you save time and eliminate frustrating data entry errors. Our customers frequently use Excellent Importer to avoid integrations where the volumes do not justify the cost of building the integrations.
If you want to try Excellent Importer, you can find it in Microsoft Marketplace. If you would like more information about Excellent Importer, then you can email us.
Usage Scenarios
- Import expenses, payroll entries, adjustments, and internal cost reallocations
- Create purchase documents for vendors or sales documents for customers
- Purchase orders from a replenishment system with no integration to Business Central.
- Sales orders or invoices to record sales through Amazon, AliExpress or another platform when the volumes do not justify the costs of integrating the platform to Business Central. You can even use it as a temporary measure while building an integration.
- Create take-on entries for new companies in General Ledger, Customer, Vendor, Fixed Asset and Inventory
- Bulk-create journal lines or documents ready for posting
- Import sales or purchase prices and automatically expire old prices
- Import remittance advice from customers and automatically apply payments to invoices according to the remittance
Why Excellent Importer?
Business Central ships with the data configuration packages that allow you to import data from Excel, Data Exchange that lets you import from text, and you can also use the Edit in Excel feature on most pages. So why would you want to get a different extension?
The most obvious reason for doing this is that Excellent Importer allows you to import data in the format you receive it, rather than requiring you to transform the data into a specific column format. Using what you receive saves you time and reduces the risk of errors. But there are more reasons to use Excellent Importer:
| Excellent Importer | Edit in Excel | Configuration Packages | Data Exchange | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Import Excel files | ✔️ | 🔵 | 🔵 | ❌ |
| Import variable-length text files (e.g. CSV files) | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | ✔️ |
| Import fixed-length text files | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | 🔵 |
| Trigger automatic imports from an external system (e.g. Power Automate) using an API | ✔️ | ❌ | 🔵 | ❌ |
| Handle more complex files with different record types (e.g. Header, Detail and Footer records) | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | 🔵 |
| Use values from different record types (e.g. map data from header records and detail records) | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Handle different Excel formats and map columns to Business Central fields | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | ✔️ |
| Define multiple templates to support files in different formats | ✔️ | ❌ | 🔵 | ✔️ |
| Import sales and purchase documents from a single sheet | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Map accounts from external systems to Business Central accounts | ✔️ | ❌ | ✔️ | 🔵 |
| Map a single text string to Business Central Account/Dimensions | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Specify constant values for values not present in the file | ✔️ | ❌ | 🔵 | ✔️ |
| Available from the pages where the data needs to be imported | ✔️ | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Configurable rules to handle document numbers, etc. | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Handle item tracking on item journals, sales documents and purchase documents | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Transform incoming data with transformation rules, multipliers, etc. | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | ✔️ |
| Synchronize templates between companies | ✔️ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
- ✔️ all users have access to these features (assuming they have permissions).
- 🔵 available but with limitations.
- ❌ not available.
Highlights
Quick highlights — features customers tell us they love:
- Create or update mapping templates directly from your real file and preview the mapped results live (see: Create Mapping From File).
- Convert legacy or external codes into Business Central accounts and dimensions using Account/Dimension Mapping.
- Map values to Custom Values and run extensible actions (for example, Add Additional Line) to create multiple lines or route amounts to different accounts.
- Apply transformation rules, multipliers and concatenation to normalise and convert data during import.
- Use row filters, multi-record-type and multi-sheet support to import complex spreadsheets without pre-processing.
- Automate imports via the API (Power Automate friendly) and choose how imports behave when posting or errors occur.
Also includes:
- Template synchronisation and copy between companies
- File linking and traceability for imported records (link files to imported records)
- Assisted setup wizard with sample templates
- Account/Dimension Mapping templates and tokenised descriptions
- Create Mapping From File — preview, validation and transformation features
Supported Countries
This app is supported in all countries where Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is available.
Supported Languages
The app supports the following languages: English, German, Dutch, French, Japanese, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Danish, Polish, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, and Chinese (various locales).