Historical data import

1

Hi all, I’m planning to switch from Xero to FreeAgent this year. I would like to transfer several years of historical data between the two systems rather than only the limited datasets documented in the official import instructions. I’d like to import invoices and bills (both with PDF attachments), contacts, bank transactions, and individual ledger entries (e.g. VAT, adjustments).

Both applications have full APIs making this theoretically possible but I wanted to check if there are some known limitations that make this infeasible? Rate limiting is not a problem as it doesn’t matter how long the import takes. I searched the forum history and am surprised I couldn’t find anything where this has come up before.

2

Hi Andrew,

Here is a link from freeagent which will help you out. https://support.freeagent.com/hc/en-gb/articles/360019910020-A-guide-to-switching-to-FreeAgent

I assume you are planning to write the integration yourself then i noticed this from the page which states “Please note that you would only bring data into FreeAgent that occurred on or after your FreeAgent start date.”.

I have recently used the free agent and xero api and i assume you might have challenges around pulling attachments from xero

3

Thanks Vijay, yes it looks like I would simply set the FreeAgent Start Date back to the date that I want to import data from.

Thanks for the insight about attachments. It looks simple in the API docs, call the “/Attachments” endpoint underneath the invoice identifier and then enumerate the result to retrieve the individual attachments. But I haven’t tried it out directly yet!