Troubleshooting Report Upload Errors

This article will cover common errors encountered when uploading the three main source files into Absolute: General Ledger, Revenue & Usage Report, and the Payroll report. If Absolute detects a flaw in the data, an error message will pop up in the Map/Define Headers stage within that specific section of Absolute. 

Number format

When importing source files into Absolute, one of the most common errors is having rows with improper characters (letters, dashes, etc) in the Ending Balance column. Scientific Notation is not permissible and will not be accepted by Absolute. This column should only include numbers formatted as General, Number, or Accounting in Excel. 

Blank or Null data

As seen in the screenshot below, if a blank row is included in the source file, Absolute will give the following two errors:

• The Quantity (Units) and Transaction Amount (Balance) has invalid data.
  • This error indicates that all rows must have an acceptable value in the Units and Amount column. If for example, a balance is 0, please ensure a proper value is entered to account for this. 
• The following headers contain blank or null data. 
  • The headers listed in the error message must contain data, and cannot be left blank. If the source data is correct and there is no data in one or more of these headers, an acceptable placeholder can be entered, such as "99999" for the department or "000" for the revenue code. 

File Size

Please note Absolute's file size limit is 100 Megabytes. If the file exceeds this limit, Absolute will give the following error:

This can often be solved by pivoting down the file, by creating a pivot table of the source data, and only including the data pertinent to Absolute. 

For example, if a payroll file includes detail down to the employee level (such as Name and Employee ID) this will cause the file to be too large to import. Since this type of information has no utility in Absolute, this can be excluded from the import file entirely. To fix this, the preparer can create a pivot table and exclude the unnecessary columns in order to arrive at a condensed version of the data.