Import from QuickBooks Desktop

What the import reads

The import reads the lists and balances you need to keep trading on day one: your chart of accounts, terms, taxes, classes, customers, vendors and items, plus open invoices, open credits and unpaid bills. It also reads the trial balance and the ageing reports, which it uses later to prove the import landed correctly.

In the full-year mode it goes further and reads every transaction type for the year, along with open purchase orders, estimates and sales orders. That way your reports in SeroPOS show the whole year, not just a starting balance, and customers' statements carry their real history. Open estimates and sales orders come across too.

• Accounts, terms, taxes and classes
• Customers, vendors and items
• Open invoices, credits and bills
• Trial balance and ageing
• In full-year mode: all transactions, open POs, estimates and sales orders

The six steps

Start from Import from QuickBooks on the QuickBooks dashboard, or under Settings. You connect a separate Web Connector app with its own .qwc file, which you run by hand when you are ready. It is kept apart from the everyday QuickBooks Desktop sync, so reading your old file never interferes with posting new sales.

Then you choose a mode, set a cutover date and give the run a label you will recognize later. Reading shows live progress. When it finishes, you check the results against your books before anything is created, commit in the background, reconcile the trial balance, and keep the option to undo.

• Connect the read-only Web Connector app
• Read: choose full year or opening balances, set the cutover date
• Check against your books
• Commit, choosing the location for opening stock
• Reconcile the trial balance
• Undo if something is wrong

Checking before anything is written

The check step is where an accountant earns their keep, and the screen is laid out for that. Receivables and payables are compared with the QuickBooks ageing reports, so you can see that every customer's balance and every supplier's balance came across. The posting-role mapping shows which QuickBooks account plays which part in SeroPOS.

A preview lists what will be created, and an exceptions list flags anything that needs a decision first. Nothing is written to SeroPOS until you commit. When you do, the commit runs in the background and puts opening stock into the location you pick, so a multi-store business can choose where the counts belong.

Undo, history and permissions

Every run is kept in the past imports history with its label, so you can see what was brought across and when. If the result is not right, undo rolls the import back. To protect real trading, undo refuses once sales or purchases have been recorded after the import, unless it is forced.

Committing and undoing are guarded by their own permission, so a staff member who can see the import cannot commit it by accident. Accounting firms can run the import in accountant mode for a client, which keeps each client's import separate. Imports for different clients are kept separate. An owner can let a bookkeeper read and check an import while keeping the final commit for themselves.

After the move

Once your balances are in SeroPOS, sales from the till, purchases and expenses carry on from the cutover date. If you still want QuickBooks Desktop to receive your sales while you settle in, the regular QuickBooks Desktop integration can keep posting to it. Many businesses run both for a period, then stop the sync when their accountant is happy.

If you are moving to full accounting rather than just a POS, SeroBooks, our sister accounting product, is built for businesses leaving QuickBooks Desktop and offers the desktop-style menus people are used to. It keeps the till, the stock and the ledger in one family of products. You can read more about it on the SeroBooks page, including how it handles Canadian sales tax and payroll, and how a business that already runs SeroPOS links the two.