Switching / From QuickBooks
Move from QuickBooks without losing a number.
Half a day is the honest estimate: thirty minutes exporting, an hour importing and mapping, twenty minutes proving the balances tie out — and the rest spent being pleasantly surprised. Import is free, and nothing is written until you have seen the preview.
Before you start
Three decisions worth ten minutes each
Nearly every migration that goes badly went wrong before a single file moved. Settle these three and the rest is file handling.
Pick a clean cut-over date
The first of a month is good; the first of your fiscal year is better. Best of all is the day after your last reconciled bank statement — everything before it is settled history, everything after it is new work in Bokeping.
Decide how much history you actually need
You rarely need every year you have ever recorded. Open invoices and bills, plus the current fiscal year, covers most businesses. Anything older is reference — and QuickBooks can keep holding it.
Keep the old system read-only for a quarter
Do not cancel QuickBooks the day you import. Stop entering new work in it, let the subscription run to its renewal, and export PDF copies of the reports you would hate to lose. A fallback you never use is cheap; one you needed and canceled is not.
The sequence
Seven steps, in this order
The order matters more than the speed. Lists before transactions, transactions before balances, balances before you trust a single report.
- 1
Reconcile, then freeze
Run your last bank reconciliation in QuickBooks through the cut-over date and let it finish clean. The numbers you are about to import are only as trustworthy as the day you copy them from — reconciling first means any discrepancy you find later belongs to the import, not to the history.
- 2
Export your lists
QuickBooks produces separate exports for your lists — customers, vendors, items and the chart of accounts. Keep them as separate files rather than one merged sheet: each one imports into a different place in Bokeping, and separate files make the import report easy to read.
- 3
Export your transactions — and three proof reports
Take a .QBO or .CSV export of your transactions for the period you decided to bring across. Then export three reports as of the cut-over date: trial balance, A/R aging summary, A/P aging summary. Those three are how you will prove, in twenty minutes, that the migration was faithful.
- 4
Import the lists first, in order
Chart of accounts, then customers and vendors, then items. Bokeping guesses which of your columns is which, shows you every guess in a preview, and writes nothing until you confirm. Fix the mapping once and it holds for the rest of the file.
How column mapping works - 5
Import the transactions
Open invoices arrive still open, paid ones still paid, bills with their due dates intact. Duplicates are detected and skipped rather than doubled, so an overlap between two exports lands once. Every row comes back in the report as landed, skipped or flagged — with the reason and the row number.
- 6
Post opening balances and tie out
Opening balances post to the right accounts as of your cut-over date, so day one in Bokeping agrees with the last day in QuickBooks. Now open the three reports you exported and compare: bank balances, A/R total, A/P total. If those agree, the migration is sound.
Financial statements in Bokeping - 7
Connect the bank and send one invoice
Bank feeds are Plaid-powered, read-only, and included on every plan — two minutes to connect, and you can do it during the trial. Confirm the first batch of categorizations and the suggestions start learning your habits. Then send one real invoice from your imported customer list. That is the moment it stops feeling like a project.
How bank feeds work
The honest inventory
What comes across, and what doesn’t
What comes across
Customers and vendors, with their balances. Names, contact details and what each one owes you or you owe them as of the cut-over date.
Your items list. Products and services with prices and descriptions, ready to drop onto the first invoice.
Your account structure — with a caveat. Bokeping starts you on a standard chart of accounts rather than lifting yours across wholesale. Rename and add what you need before you import transactions, and the preview shows you where each one is landing so nothing files itself under the wrong heading.
Open invoices and bills. Still open, still aged, still chasing the same people. Partly paid documents keep the balance that is actually outstanding.
Bank transaction history. The lines behind the balance, so your first reconciliation in Bokeping has something to reconcile against.
Opening balances that tie out. Posted as of your cut-over date, to the account they belong in — which is why the trial balance comparison is a twenty-minute job and not a week.
What doesn’t
QuickBooks Payroll history and filed tax forms. Pay runs, payroll liabilities and anything you have already filed stay with Intuit. Export PDFs of your payroll registers and year-end forms before you stop paying for the subscription, and keep a payroll provider — Bokeping does not run payroll and does not file returns.
Memorized reports and custom layouts. A saved report is a saved set of options, not data. Rebuild the two or three you actually open; most people find the default statements cover them.
Bank rules. Your QuickBooks rules do not travel. Bokeping learns from the categorizations you confirm in the first week instead of asking you to re-type the rules — but that first week is you teaching it.
Reconciliation status on past periods. History arrives as history, not as pre-cleared lines. You do not re-reconcile the past: the opening balance as of the cut-over date is the settled figure, and reconciliation starts fresh from there.
Attachments beyond what you can export. Receipts and documents attached inside QuickBooks come across only if you download them. Pull them out in a batch while you still have access.
Class and location tracking, where we have no equivalent. Where your classes or locations line up with a dimension Bokeping keeps, they map. Where they do not, that detail lands as description text rather than something reportable — worth checking before you rely on it.
Bokeping does not sell payroll, file tax returns, or do project and job costing. It also does not consolidate multiple entities — you can run more than one company from a single login, each with its own books and its own plan, but there is no combined set of statements across them. If your QuickBooks file leans on any of those, keep the tool that does them — a payroll provider such as Gusto or ADP, your filing agent, your consolidation spreadsheet — and let Bokeping be the ledger underneath.
A realistic week
Export Monday morning. Reconcile Friday afternoon.
Mon 9:00
Export
Lists, then transactions, then the three proof reports. Around thirty minutes of clicking and waiting.
Mon 11:00
Import and map
Files in, columns confirmed in the preview, import report read. The lists take minutes; the transactions take longer to check than to load.
Mon 15:00
Tie out, connect the bank
Trial balance and the two agings against your exports. Then the bank feed — read-only, two minutes.
Tue
First invoice out
From the imported customer list, on your own template, with the right number in sequence.
Fri
First reconciliation
The week’s feed against the bank. Twelve minutes, because the opening balance was right on Monday.
Then leave QuickBooks read-only until you have closed a full quarter in Bokeping. By the time the renewal comes round, the decision makes itself.
While you are here
The three things people check next
What the importer actually does
The mapping preview, duplicate detection, and the report that gives every row a verdict.
CSV & QBO importBring your accountant with you
Free access on every plan, a real general ledger underneath, and period lock when the year closes.
For accountantsThe first reconciliation
What Friday looks like once the opening balance is right — and how the feed learns your habits.
ReconciliationFAQs
Fair questions about leaving QuickBooks
Yes, and for the first quarter you should — as a fallback, not as a second set of books. Keep QuickBooks readable but stop entering new work in it. Entering the same invoice in both systems does not give you a safety net; it gives you two versions of the truth and no way to tell which one is wrong.
Most businesses do. Pick the first of a month, ideally the day after your last reconciled statement, and import the year to date so a single system reports the whole year. If you would rather import only open balances, that works too — your year-end pack is then the QuickBooks reports for the stub period plus Bokeping from the cut-over on, which is exactly what an accountant expects to see in a switching year.
You can, in about twenty minutes: bank balances, A/R total, A/P total and a trial balance where debits equal credits, each against the report you exported from QuickBooks. If you would rather someone else signed it off, invite your accountant — every plan includes 2 free accountant seats that don’t count against your own user count, and they get a real general ledger and audit trail to look at, not a summary.
Nothing. There is no migration fee, no setup fee and no service to buy. CSV and QBO file import are included on every plan, and a new company starts on a 30-day trial at $0 with up to 5 users — long enough to run the whole migration and a first month of real work before you decide. After that you pick a paid plan: Starter is $19 a month for 3 users, Pro $49 for 10, Business $99 for 50, Advanced $249. Plans are billed monthly.
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