Leaving QuickBooks: what actually moves over

Most people stay on software they don't love for one reason: moving feels scary. Years of history, hundreds of customers, a chart of accounts somebody set up in 2017 that nobody fully understands anymore. What if something breaks?

It's a fair worry. But switching is much less dramatic than it sounds, as long as you do it in the right order and check your work at the end. Here's how we'd approach it.

Pick a clean moment

The easiest time to switch is the start of a period: January 1 is ideal, the start of a quarter is fine, the first of a month works.

You can switch mid-month. It's just messier, because you end up with half a month of activity in each system and have to be careful not to count anything twice.

Whatever you choose, write the date down. That's your cutover date, and everything else keys off it.

What comes with you

With a proper migration, almost everything you care about moves:

• Your chart of accounts. Every account, with its type and number.
• Customers and vendors. Names, contact details, and for vendors, whether they need a 1099.
• Products and services. Your item list, with prices.
• Open invoices and unpaid bills. So you keep chasing what you're owed and paying what you owe, without missing a beat.
• Your history. Past transactions and journal entries, so last year's reports still work in the new system.

That last one matters more than people think. If you only bring over opening balances, you lose the ability to look back. Next spring your accountant asks "what did we spend on contractors in Q2 last year?" and the answer lives in a system you've stopped paying for.

What you'll redo by hand

A few things never travel well between any two accounting systems, so plan for them:

• Bank connections. You'll reconnect your banks and cards in the new software. It takes minutes, but it's on you.
• Payroll setup. If payroll ran inside your old software, that's its own move.
• Recurring templates and custom settings. Invoice layouts, reminder emails, rules you built to sort transactions. Worth recreating anyway, since half of them are probably out of date.

How to export from QuickBooks

QuickBooks will hand over your data as spreadsheets. The main ones:

1. Account List, which is your chart of accounts
2. Customer and Vendor Contact Lists
3. Journal or General Ledger for your history
4. Trial Balance as of your cutover date

That trial balance is the most important file in the pile. Hang onto it. It's how you'll prove the move worked.

Before you cancel anything, check how long your old provider keeps read-only access after you leave, and export more than you think you need. Storage is cheap. Regret isn't.

How to know nothing got lost

Here's the test: after the migration, run a trial balance in your new software for the same date and put it next to the one you exported from QuickBooks.

Every account should match. To the cent.

If it does, your books came over whole. If an account is off, you know exactly where to look, instead of finding out in March when the numbers for your tax return don't add up.

Then do a second sanity check with your eyes: open your balance sheet and profit and loss in both systems for last year. Same numbers? You're done.

How we do it in Neo-Capital

Every Neo-Capital tier can import from QuickBooks. The importer tells you exactly which files to export, then does a rehearsal on a copy of your books and shows you what it's about to post before a single line is written. Anything in your export that doesn't balance gets left out and listed, with its number, date and name, so you can fix it at the source.

When you confirm, it checks the result against the trial balance you exported. And if you run it again, nothing that already came in gets imported twice. We also take exports from Xero, Wave and FreshBooks, which are in beta.

If you're an accounting firm moving a whole client list, talk to us about migration. We'd rather help you do it right than have you do it alone.