ApnaComplex supports excel upload for most of the functionality. Units, Members, Vehicles, Assets, Opening Balances, Charges, Payments, Bills, Expenses, Credit Notes and many more – all these have excel templates. However, first time users typically encounter issues while uploading the excel sheet into the portal.

Listed below are few very common reasons why excel uploads cause trouble to the user:

1. Excel file format: System supports only .xls (Excel 97-2003 workbook format) files. Not .xlsx (the newer excel format). All our templates are .xls in format. At times, after adding the data, its likely might have saved the file as .xlsx file. Check the extension – if it is .xlsx please save the file as .xls format (please click File->Save As.  In the dialog, please select Excel 97-2003 (*.xls). Save the file and then upload this new file.

2. Browser Issue: At times, browsers (especially Firefox) uplaods excel files into the system with a wrong mime type and due to this you keep getting error that the file type is not supported. This is due to bug in browsers(Read http://techblog.procurios.nl/k/news/view/15872/14863/mimetype-corruption-in-firefox.html for more details). The easiest fix for this issue is to use another browser like IE for uploads. You could also try uninstalling your browser and then re-install the same and upload.

3. Blank Rows at the end: Once you upload you excel, you might at times see lots of blank rows on the confirmation screen throwing up validation errors. Please go to your excel, select all the rows after the last row of data (control+shift+end will select all blank rows if you place the cursor on the first blank row), right click and delete all selected rows. This will ensure that no hidden data is getting saved and getting uploaded. Save the file and upload again. This will also improve the size of your excel.

4. Date Formatting Issues: ApnaComplex accepts date only in dd/mm/yyyy format. However, based on how excel default settings are in your machine, this format gets changed to some other formats. To avoid issues due to dates, its strongly recommended to explicitly set format of the column where date must be entered to ‘text’ and then enter the date. This will eliminate issues related to dates.

5. Zero Prefixes: Most of the templates have flat/unit number as one of the columns. Most societies have unit names like ‘001’, ‘002’, ‘003’ etc. When these are entered in the excel, by default they are treated as numbers and become 1, 2, 3 leading to a loss in the zero prefixes. This will result in error as system cannot find the units/flats with these names. Same thing can happen with cheque number columns as well where a cheque number ‘001020’ becomes ‘1020’ resulting in validation errors. Its recommended to convert such columns as well explicitly to text to ensure the zero prefixes are not lost.