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Migrating from UpperBee

The wizard brings across your fractions, co-owners, chart of accounts, suppliers, financial statements, documents, obligations, improvements and service requests — eleven steps, each naming the matching UpperBee export path. Order matters: suppliers come before financial statements, or every expense arrives without its payee. What does not come over matters more than what does.

The migration runs as an eleven-step wizard, and each step tells you where to find the matching export inside UpperBee. This guide covers the order, what comes across, and above all what does not.

The eleven steps

  1. Configuration — the syndicate's basic settings.
  2. Units & fractions — fractions, shares, parking spaces and lockers.
  3. Co-owners — co-owners and undivided ownership, attached to each unit.
  4. Chart of accounts — your UpperBee accounts, mapped to expense categories.
  5. Suppliers — your suppliers and their contracts.
  6. Financial statements — opening balances and the year's general ledger.
  7. Documents & by-laws — the files in your register.
  8. Obligations — water heaters and insurance.
  9. Private improvements — standard finishes and recorded improvements.
  10. Service requests — your requests, with their original dates.
  11. Review & sign-off — the final read-through.

All of them can be skipped and reopened, except the eleventh: it is a read-through, it does not import.

Why suppliers come before financial statements

This order is not cosmetic. In UpperBee's general ledger, an expense names its payee in the "Description" column. CondoAide matches that to the corresponding supplier — but it can only do so if the supplier already exists when the ledger is committed.

Import the financial statements before the suppliers and every expense arrives with no payee, leaving a column to fill in by hand. Follow the order offered.

Files and their size

Most steps expect an Excel workbook exported from UpperBee, and the screen gives you the exact path: for units, for instance, "Registres → Propriété → Unités → Actions → Import / export d'unités".

One limit is worth knowing in advance: steps that post a form accept 4 MB for the whole submission, not per file. The financial statements step expects four files — two trial balances, the general ledger and, optionally, the budget — and all four must fit inside that 4 MB together.

Two steps escape the limit because their files go straight to storage: documents (25 MB per file, up to 500 per batch) and service requests (15 MB per file, up to 200).

Expect volume on the requests step: UpperBee produces that export one resident at a time, so a syndicate arrives with dozens of PDFs rather than one.

What the migration does not carry over

This is the part to read before you start.

Vehicles are not imported. UpperBee's export loses too much detail; ask co-owners to re-enter their own instead.

Request status. UpperBee does track a status on screen, but its PDF export does not contain it, nor the follow-up, nor the attachments. Every imported request therefore arrives marked resolved, with an internal note saying so: reopen the ones still in progress.

Tenants and occupants, unless you supply the second file on the Co-owners step. Without it, only owners come across.

Truncated finishes. UpperBee cuts some improvement values at the first apostrophe, and the full text is not in the file: it cannot be recovered. Read through the improvements register and complete them by hand.

Undivided ownership beyond two people. UpperBee keeps only two contacts per fraction; past that, reconstructing it takes a human decision.

Invitations. No message is sent to co-owners during the import. Opening the portal to them is a separate step.

Budget adoption. A budget arrives as a draft and charges nothing. The board adopts it afterwards, and that adoption is what generates the amounts due.

Financial statements are archived as documents, not recomputed.

A side effect worth knowing: insurance certificates

The Obligations step accepts a PDF of co-owners' insurance certificates, and importing it activates the "proof of home insurance" obligation across every unit. From then on, co-owners whose unit has no valid proof start receiving email reminders.

That is not a defect — it is what the obligation is for — but it is not something to discover afterwards. Import those certificates when your syndicate is ready for the reminders to go out.

Also worth knowing: only the pages that establish the insurance are kept. Pages carrying bank details, a pre-authorised debit mandate, an invoice or a claims history are not uploaded at all.

Shares of the common expenses: check them, the wizard will not arbitrate

The units step adds up the relative values and tells you what it finds. If the total is not 100%, it shows a warning — "the shares do not total 100%" — and lets you import anyway.

That is deliberate. Real deeds round: 99.90% and 100.02% both appear in declarations we hold. Some condos work on an entirely different scale, ten-thousandths for instance. The wizard never rebalances anything: relative values are read from the declaration of co-ownership, they are not recomputed. A decision of the syndicate that, contrary to the declaration, imposed a change to a co-owner's relative value would in any case be without effect (art. 1102 CCQ).

So treat the warning as an invitation to compare the file against your declaration of co-ownership. If the gap is the deed's own rounding, import. If it comes from the file, fix the file.

The last step re-runs the check once everything is in, and flags the legitimate cases too — a lot held by the syndicate, for example, attaches to no unit and is not charged.

Frequently asked questions

What has to be re-entered after migrating from UpperBee?

Vehicles, which are not imported at all. The real status of any request still open, since UpperBee's PDF export does not carry it and every request arrives marked resolved. Improvement finishes that UpperBee truncated at the first apostrophe. And undivided co-ownerships of more than two people per fraction, which UpperBee does not keep.

Do co-owners get an invitation during the import?

No, no message is sent during the import. Giving them portal access is a separate step, to take when you are ready.

Can a step be skipped?

Yes. Every step can be skipped and reopened later, except the last one — Review & sign-off — which is a read-through and neither imports nor skips.

Does an imported budget start charging fees straight away?

No. A budget arrives as a draft. It is the board's adoption of it, under Finances then Budget, that generates each unit's amounts due.

Related guides

Do it now

Follow the steps above in your own syndicate.