You have selected a Simply form file of another form type" Simply Accounting error
Simply Accounting is telling you the form file you picked is the wrong form type, or that the form file itself is damaged.
You have hit this message:
“You have selected a Simply form file of another form type, or the Simply form file you selected has been damaged.”
Despite how it reads, this is usually not a warning about your company data. It is about a form file: the template that controls how an invoice, cheque, or other document prints. Simply Accounting (the Canadian name for Sage 50) is saying it cannot use the form you selected, either because the form is not the type it expects for that task, or because the form file itself has gone bad. Your accounting data is typically untouched.
Which half of the message applies to you?
The message covers two different problems, and the fix depends on which one you have.
The first is a mismatch. Every form file is built for a specific form type: an invoice template will not load where a cheque template is expected, and so on. If you recently copied forms between companies, restored a backup from another company, or picked a file from a dialog without checking its type, the mismatch is the likely cause.
The second is damage. If the form worked before and now fails on the same task in the same company, the form file itself may be corrupt. Copying files while Simply Accounting was open, an interrupted save, or a bad network transfer can all do it.
Check the form type first
Go back to the form selection and confirm you chose a form of the correct type for what you are printing. If you have several form files with similar names, it is easy to attach an invoice form to a cheque layout. Try selecting a different form of the right type, or the built-in default form for that document, and print again.
If the default form works and your custom form does not, the custom form file is the problem, not your data.
Try restoring the form from an earlier backup
If the form is one you customized, an older backup of your company may contain a working copy of it. Restoring that form file and reselecting it often clears the message. We cannot give exact steps here because form handling varies between releases of Simply Accounting and Sage 50; the safe general approach is to restore the backup to a separate folder so nothing current is overwritten, then copy the form file from there.
If the form file is damaged
A damaged form file usually cannot be repaired from inside the program. You can rebuild the layout by hand if the customization was simple, or fall back to a default form while you sort it out. Neither of those recovers the original design.
Our engineers can often recover the contents of a damaged form file, and if the damage points to deeper problems in the database we can address that too. See our Sage 50 and Simply Accounting database repair service for what we handle.
If the real goal is moving to QuickBooks
Sometimes this message appears during a conversion, when a form file from the old company is carried along and no longer fits. If you are moving your Simply Accounting data to QuickBooks, that is a separate exercise from fixing forms, and we handle it directly: see our Simply Accounting to QuickBooks conversion service.
A useful next step
Before anything else, test with a default form. That one test tells you whether you have a simple mismatch or a damaged file, and it takes a minute. If it points to damage, send us the form file (and the company file if printing misbehaves generally) for a free evaluation; we will tell you what is recoverable before any work begins.