Understanding the Conversion Process

Reconverting from VAP

Up until clicking Import in the Contact Import Wizard, the conversion process can be abandoned by clicking Cancel or clicking No to a question. If it is abandoned the process will start again the next time the user goers into Accounts Formatting. But once Import has been clicked, the conversion takes place.

Normally the VAP data cannot be reconverted. However if the client is unlinked from Central in Edit Client, the client’s accounting period in Central is deleted. If the user then goes back into Accounts Formatting, the client is relinked and the data reconverted from VAP.

It is possible to go back into Nominal Client Details after conversion and change the Accounts Formatter back to Viztopia. If you do this and go back into Accounts Formatting, you will see the old VAP data and be able to use the old VAP formatter as before. However any changes that are made are not reconverted unless the user follows the procedure in the last paragraph.

Comparing data from before and after the conversion

By switching the Accounts Formatter back to Viztopia it is possible to have both VAP open for a client and AP open for the same client by selecting the AP client directly in Central. This is useful for comparing results from before and after the conversion.

If the contacts already exist in Central

It is recommended above that if the contacts already exist, or might exist, in Central then you should not tick the client on the Contact Import Wizard to import them again. This would create duplicate contacts in Central which would need to be cleaned up.

It is quicker just to reattach the existing contacts after conversion. To do this:

• Open the client in Central. (Click Clients, search and double-click to open the correct client).
• Click on the Associated tab. If there isn’t one visible, right-click the heading for any tab, e.g. Main, select Tab Chooser, tick Associated and click OK.
  • Click Add (to add a new association).
  • Click the Relationship type, e.g. “has beneficiary of”
  • Click Search to select the contact
  • Click OK.
  • Repeat for the remaining contacts.

If the contacts do not already exist in Central

If the user is certain that the contacts do not already exist in Central then they can be imported. VAP makes a distinction between Personnel and Addresses, but they are all imported as Contacts into Central. To be precise they are imported as Draft Contacts. Draft Contacts need to be Approved before they become normal Contacts. 

If some contacts already exist in Central

It is possible in the Contact Import Wizard to import some contacts and not others. This is not generally useful. But if required, click the arrow to the left of the client tick box to see the individual contacts and then just tick the contacts to import.

Note that if a contact acts as an officer of two different clients in VAP then the contact will be imported when the first client is converted. When the second client comes to be converted, this contact will already be present in Central, but other officers may not. This does not cause a problem. The contacts can be imported again and no duplicate contacts are created because the contact name exactly matches the name that was imported before.

However in other situations, where some contacts may already be present in Central and their names may not exactly match the same people in VAP, it is much safer to convert without importing contacts.

How the conversion detects duplicate contacts

If contacts are imported, Central needs to decide whether the contact being imported is a new contact that should be added or is identical to an existing contact. It does this by comparing  fields on the imported contact with those on existing Central contacts. The fields compared depend on whether the contact is in VAP’s Addresses list or in the Personnel list.

Addresses

Personnel

In most cases this gives the correct result. But if two Personnel in VAP are both called Mr John Smith, they will be merged into a single Mr John Smith in Central, even if they have different addresses. This is because the fields used to compare Personnel do not include any address fields. This is another reason for not importing contacts.