QuickBooks to Xero: what moves over and what doesn’t

The three ways across

Xero’s own QuickBooks conversion page describes three routes. Which one fits decides most of what you end up with in Xero.

• An automated conversion through Jet Convert, Xero’s conversion partner. It moves your chart of accounts, contacts and historical transactions such as invoices and bills.
• A fresh start. You enter your balances from your most recent tax return and begin clean. No old transactions come across.
• The Xero Conversion Toolbox, where an accountant or bookkeeper prepares CSV files and imports them by hand. Slower, with the most control over what lands where.

What moves over

According to Xero, all three methods bring across your essential lists: the chart of accounts, and your customer and supplier contacts. The automated route does it for you; with the other two they are imported manually.

History is where the methods differ. Xero says Jet Convert moves your current and prior fiscal year of transactions for free, and more than two years may cost extra. The Toolbox can import as much as you have, depending on your Xero subscription, and Xero asks you to contact it first for several years of data or more than 6,000 items. A fresh start moves no history at all (Xero).

What doesn’t move

Payroll doesn’t move. Xero’s page says “Your payroll information will not migrate as part of these conversions,” and you set up payroll and enter employee details in Xero yourself (Xero).

Beyond that, a few things are rebuilt rather than copied, whichever method you use:

• Bank feeds. The connections to your bank are made again inside Xero, in your name.
• Reports and settings. Plan to set up again in Xero the reports you actually look at, your invoice template and who has access. The conversion moves data, not the way you had QuickBooks arranged.
• Anything else you rely on, such as attached receipt images or connected apps. Make a list and ask whoever runs the conversion how each item is handled before you start.

Before you switch

Xero’s own checklist for your QuickBooks data before a conversion (Xero):

• Reconcile your bank and credit card accounts, so the balances match.
• Review what customers owe you and what you owe suppliers, and apply any credit notes.
• Check your inventory and sales tax balances, and that those returns are filed.

We’d add one more: pick a clean switch date, such as a month end or the start of your financial year. Keep working in QuickBooks until that date, then Xero takes over. A switch in the middle of a month leaves you with half a month in each system.

After you switch: keep the old data

Cancelling QuickBooks doesn’t mean you can throw its records away. Intuit says that when you cancel QuickBooks Online you keep read-only access to your data for one year, and can export it to Excel or to a desktop version of QuickBooks in that time (Intuit). Trials get 90 days. Export before you cancel, not after.

You keep it for tax reasons. The IRS’s general rule is to keep the records behind a return until its period of limitations runs out, three years in the ordinary case and longer in some situations (IRS, how long to keep records). Xero makes the same point on its fresh start option: hold on to the old QuickBooks data file.

What we do, and what it costs

Our Xero migration is a flat $750 and usually takes 2 to 4 weeks. We redesign the chart of accounts before anything moves, bring your history across as far back as we agree when we scope it, set up the feeds and the workflow, then check the balances in Xero against QuickBooks. It also works from Wave or spreadsheets.

If the QuickBooks file needs cleaning first, that’s priced on its own, and the catch-up bookkeeping page explains how. The full migration scope is on the Xero migration page.