All your boss asked for is to get with business partner X, send them the data they need and then process their output. How hard could it be?

Prying From Cold Dead Hands
Or how to interface with other companies or departments in a fast and affective manner. Sometimes coming to agreement on the what and how is the hard part.

Why Importing and Exporting are coupled
Sure you could toss together some Ruby script in one big stream of consciousness file, but you've been basking in the glory of Rails too long for that kind of crappy coding. What you need is a tested, object oriented way of dealing with that pile of data that you want to add to your precious database.

Where should the code go?
Does export/import code go in the model? Is it part of the controller? A library? What about Rake tasks? So many options and you don't want to be the guy who uses a few of each. What we need here is a convention.

Transfer Options
Sometimes just getting the data in and out of your database isn't enough, sometimes you actually have to give it to someone, or worse yet go and get it from someone.