Bringing your existing books over

Choosing a migration depth

There are three honest options, and the right one depends on why you would ever look backwards.

Approach	What comes over	Good when
Opening balances only	One balanced entry per entity as of the cutover date, plus open A/R and A/P detail.	Most businesses. Fastest, cleanest, and enough to run correct books forward.
Balances plus one or two prior years	Opening balances and summarized monthly history for comparatives.	You want year-over-year reporting inside Books without importing every transaction.
Full transaction history	Every transaction from your prior system.	Audit, diligence, or lender requirements. Expect real reconciliation work.

Importing lists

Lists come first because transactions reference them. Import Books handles the structural lists — chart of accounts, customers, vendors, products and services — from CSV.

1
Export each list from your prior system as CSV.
Keep the prior system's internal identifiers in a column if it offers them. They make troubleshooting duplicates much easier later.
2
Open Import Books and choose the list type.
3
Map the columns.
The importer proposes a mapping from your headers. Check the ones that matter — account type and normal balance on the chart of accounts, tax identity on vendors — and correct anything wrong before continuing.
4
Review the preview.
The preview shows what will be created and flags rows that cannot be imported, with the reason. Fix the source file and re-upload rather than hand-correcting after import.
5
Run the import, then spot-check.
Open a handful of records and confirm they look right — particularly account types, since a misclassified account will quietly distort every statement.

Entering opening balances

Opening balances go in as a journal entry dated the day before your cutover date. It should reproduce your prior system's trial balance exactly: every asset, liability, and equity balance, with the difference landing in retained earnings.

What belongs in the opening entry, and what does not:

Include: cash, accounts receivable control, inventory, fixed assets and accumulated depreciation, accounts payable control, loans, and equity.
Include: retained earnings as the balancing figure.
Exclude: revenue and expense balances, unless you are deliberately importing a partial year and understand what that does to the P&L.
Exclude: individual open invoices and bills — those come in as actual invoice and bill records so aging works, and the control account balance must then agree with their total.

The QuickBooks path

For QuickBooks Online, the guided migration connects to your QuickBooks company and pulls structure and balances across, showing progress as it works. It is the fastest way to get a faithful starting point, and it still ends the same way every migration does — with a tie-out.

1
Start the guided migration from onboarding.
You will be sent to Intuit to authorize the connection.
2
Authorize read access to the QuickBooks company.
3
Watch the migration progress.
Lists come first, then balances, then open A/R and A/P detail. The progress view reports what succeeded and what needs attention.
4
Resolve anything flagged.
The common flags are accounts with types that have no exact equivalent, and names that collide with records already in Books.
5
Disconnect when the tie-out is clean.
Leaving the connection live after cutover invites confusion about which system is authoritative.

Proving the migration tied out

A migration is not finished when the import succeeds. It is finished when three comparisons agree, as of the cutover date.

Compare	In Books	Against
Trial balance	Reports › Trial Balance as of the day before cutover	The same report from your prior system, line by line
A/R detail	Reports › A/R Aging	The prior system's open invoice list and total
A/P detail	Reports › A/P Aging	The prior system's unpaid bill list and total

Common questions

My imported trial balance is off by a small amount.

Almost always rounding on multi-currency balances, or an account in the prior system that was excluded from the export. Compare account counts first — a missing account is easier to spot than a wrong number.

Do not plug the difference to a suspense account and move on. A small unexplained difference at cutover becomes a permanent, unexplainable difference in every future statement.