Switching / From Xero
Move from Xero with the balances intact.
Half a day, honestly measured: thirty minutes of CSV exports, an hour importing and mapping, twenty minutes proving the numbers tie out against your own aged reports. Import is free, and nothing is written until you have approved the preview.
Before you start
Three decisions worth ten minutes each
Coming from Xero the mechanics are the easy part — clean CSV exports, a bank side that is usually already reconciled. What is left to decide is where the line falls, and these three settle it.
Pick a clean cut-over date
The first of a month works; the first of your fiscal year works better. Xero calls the figures you carry over your conversion balances — same idea here, and the cleaner the date, the less there is to carry.
Decide how much history you actually need
Open invoices and bills plus the current year is enough for almost everyone. Older years are reference, and Xero can keep them — read-only access to old data beats a heroic full-history migration.
Keep the old system read-only for a quarter
Stop entering new work in Xero, but let the subscription run to its renewal and export PDFs of anything you would hate to lose. A fallback you never open is cheap insurance; one you canceled last month is not.
The sequence
Seven steps, in this order
None of it is hard, but each step leans on the one above it. Work straight down the list and you never have to import the same file twice.
- 1
Get to zero unreconciled
Xero rewards you for reconciling daily, so this is usually the easy step: clear the remaining items up to your cut-over date so no bank line is still waiting for a decision. Anything you leave unreconciled becomes a discrepancy you will chase later in a system you have not learned yet.
- 2
Export each list as its own CSV
Xero exports its lists to CSV one at a time — contacts, inventory items, and your account list for reference. Keep them as separate files. Each one imports to a different place in Bokeping, and separate files make the import report readable instead of a wall.
- 3
Export transactions and three proof reports
Take the invoice, bill and bank account transaction exports for the period you are bringing across. Then export three reports as of the cut-over date: trial balance, aged receivables summary, aged payables summary. Those three are how you prove the migration in twenty minutes rather than trusting it for a year.
- 4
Import the lists, in order
Chart of accounts first, then contacts, then items. Bokeping guesses which of your columns is which, shows every guess in a preview with real rows, and writes nothing until you confirm. One useful surprise: Bokeping keeps a single contact list with customer and supplier roles, the same shape Xero uses, so contacts land as one clean list rather than two.
How column mapping works - 5
Import invoices, bills and bank history
Awaiting-payment invoices arrive still awaiting payment, part-paid documents keep the balance that is genuinely outstanding, and bank lines land as the history your first reconciliation will run against. Duplicates are detected and skipped, so an overlap between two exports lands once — with the skip listed by row.
- 6
Post opening balances and tie out
Your conversion balances become opening balances, posted to the right accounts as of the cut-over date. Now open the three reports you exported from Xero and compare: bank balances, receivables total, payables total. When those agree, the migration is sound and you can stop worrying about it.
Financial statements in Bokeping - 7
Connect the bank, re-teach the rules, send one invoice
Bank feeds are Plaid-powered and read-only, included on every plan — the trial included. Your Xero bank rules do not travel, but you do not rebuild them by hand either: confirm the first batch of suggestions and Bokeping starts matching the way you actually categorize. Then send a real invoice from your imported contact list.
How bank feeds work
The honest inventory
What comes across, and what doesn’t
What comes across
Contacts, with their balances. One list with customer and supplier roles, exactly as you keep it in Xero, plus what each side owes as of the cut-over date.
Chart of accounts. Accounts and their types, mapped into Bokeping’s structure in the preview so anything that landed under the wrong heading is corrected before it posts.
Inventory and service items. Codes, names, descriptions and prices, ready to drop onto the first invoice without retyping.
Invoices and bills, at the right status. Awaiting payment stays awaiting payment, paid stays paid, and part-paid keeps the outstanding balance rather than the original total.
Bank transaction history. The lines behind the balance, so the first reconciliation in Bokeping has something real to reconcile against.
Opening balances that tie out. Posted as of the cut-over date, to the account they belong in — which is why the comparison against your Xero trial balance takes twenty minutes.
What doesn’t
Bank rules. The single most-missed item. Xero rules are logic, not data, and there is no export that carries them. Bokeping does not ask you to re-type them either: it learns from the categorizations you confirm in the first week, so the cost is a few days of paying attention, not an afternoon of rule-building.
Payroll. Xero’s US payroll runs through a partner, so your pay runs and filings live in that partner’s system and stay there. Keep the provider — Bokeping does not run payroll and does not file returns. Post the payroll journal to Bokeping and your books stay complete.
Custom report layouts and saved reports. A saved report is a saved set of options, not data. Rebuild the two or three you genuinely open each month; the default statements cover most of what the others were doing.
Repeating invoice templates. Recurring schedules are configuration and need setting up once on this side. Worth doing on day one so nothing silently stops going out.
Files, attachments and anything from Hubdoc. Documents attached to transactions come across only if you download them first. Pull them out in a batch while you still have access to the account.
Reconciliation history and tracking categories with no equivalent. History imports as history, not as pre-reconciled lines — the opening balance is the settled figure and reconciliation starts fresh. Tracking categories map where Bokeping keeps an equivalent dimension; where it does not, that detail lands as description text rather than something you can report on.
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 you run Xero Projects, expense claims through a partner app, or a group of companies rolled up together, keep the tool that does that work and let Bokeping be the ledger underneath it.
A realistic week
Export Monday morning. Reconcile Friday afternoon.
Mon 9:00
Export
One CSV per list, then transactions, then the three proof reports. Around thirty minutes.
Mon 11:00
Import and map
One CSV at a time, each mapping confirmed against real rows. Reading the report is the slow half, and it is the half worth doing.
Mon 15:00
Tie out, connect the bank
Trial balance and both aged reports against your Xero exports. Then the bank feed — read-only, two minutes.
Tue
First invoice out
Raised against an imported contact, numbered in your own sequence, out before the coffee goes cold.
Fri
First reconciliation
The week’s feed against the bank, with suggestions already shaped by what you confirmed on Tuesday.
Then leave Xero read-only until you have closed a full quarter here. The renewal date makes the final decision easier than any feature comparison will.
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 importLife after bank rules
How categorization learns from your first week of confirmations instead of asking you to write rules.
CategorizationBring your accountant with you
Free access on every plan, a real general ledger underneath, and period lock when the year closes.
For accountantsFAQs
Fair questions about leaving Xero
Yes, and for a quarter you should — as a fallback, not as a second set of books. Keep Xero readable but stop entering new work there. Recording the same invoice twice does not give you a safety net; it gives you two versions of the truth and no way to tell which one is wrong when they disagree.
Most businesses do, and Xero users are usually well placed for it because the bank side is already reconciled. Pick the first of a month and import the year to date so one system reports the whole year. If you would rather bring only open balances, that is fine too — your year-end pack becomes the Xero reports for the stub period plus Bokeping from the cut-over on, which is exactly what an accountant expects in a switching year.
You can, in about twenty minutes: bank balances, receivables total, payables total, and a trial balance where debits equal credits — each against the report you exported from Xero. If you would rather have it signed off, invite your accountant. Accountant access is free on every plan and they get a real general ledger, audit trail and period lock to work with, not a summary screen.
Nothing, and there is no service to buy. Because everything from Xero arrives as CSV, the whole migration runs inside the 30-day trial — $0, up to 5 users, with the import tools included. After the trial 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. Accountant access sits outside that count: every plan carries 2 free external accountant seats.
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Bring your Xero data over
Every list exports as CSV, import is free on every plan, and your Xero organization stays exactly where it is.
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