QuickBooks Online to QuickBooks Online Migration

Some things about a QuickBooks Online company are decided the day it is created and cannot be revisited. The country edition is one. The home currency is the one that catches people hardest: it is set during company setup, and afterwards there is no switch that changes it.

That is a problem with no in-place fix. A business running on a QuickBooks Online company in the wrong country or the wrong currency — often because it was set up quickly, years ago, before the business looked the way it does now — cannot correct it where it stands. The only route is a new company with the right settings, and a new company is empty.

Creating the new company takes minutes. Getting years of lists and transactions into it is the actual work, and that is what this service does.

When People Need This

A country or home-currency change. The most common reason by a distance. The books are fine; the company they live in is configured wrong and cannot be reconfigured.

Consolidation. Two QuickBooks Online companies that need to become one — after an acquisition, or after a period of running divisions separately.

A fresh start that keeps the history. A new subscription, a restructured business, or a company file that accumulated years of settings nobody wants to carry forward.

In each case the shape of the problem is identical: the destination has to exist first, and it starts with nothing in it.

Two Invitations, Two Different Roles

There is nothing to upload. Both companies are in the cloud, so instead of a file we need accountant access to each of them, added through Settings, then Manage users, then Accounting firms, then Invite firm. It has to be an accountant invitation rather than a standard team-member invitation — the standard role does not carry the access this work requires. We never ask for your QuickBooks Online username and password, and you can remove our access on either company at any time.

The two invitations do different jobs, and it matters which is which. The source company is only ever read: nothing in it is changed, moved or deleted, and it is still there in full when the migration is done. The destination company is written to.

The Destination Company Is Overwritten

This is the one thing to get right before anything starts. When the migrated data is loaded, it overwrites any existing data in the company being migrated to. That company should be fresh and empty.

If you have live data in it that you need to keep — a few weeks of invoices someone has already entered, an opening balance set up by hand — do not invite us on that company. Create a new one and invite us there instead. If you are unsure whether the company you have in mind counts as empty, ask before sending the second invitation rather than after. The source company is never at risk either way.

What Moves

Lists move in full: chart of accounts, customers, vendors, employees, items, classes, departments or locations, terms, payment methods, tax agencies, tax codes and tax rates, the currencies the company uses, and budgets.

Transactions move for a date range agreed before the work begins — invoices, bills, payments, bill payments, journal entries, estimates, sales receipts, credit memos, refund receipts, purchases, purchase orders, deposits, transfers and time activities. Because the two companies are entirely separate, every record is created new in the destination and every internal reference is re-pointed at the destination’s own version of the record it refers to. Lists load before the transactions that depend on them, so the destination is consistent at every stage rather than only at the end.

Not carried: attachments, audit-log history, bank-feed connections, recurring templates and custom report layouts. Payroll history, filings and reconciliations sit outside the scope. Bank feeds and recurring templates are re-established directly in the destination once you are working in it.

We also do not correct or re-code anything on the way through. Errors in the source arrive intact in the destination, so it is worth reviewing your P&L and balance sheet before the work starts rather than meeting the same discrepancy in a brand-new company afterwards.

E-Tech Corporation publishes the engineering detail of this work, including how the two invitations and the overwrite are handled, in its write-up on migrating between QuickBooks Online companies.

Before You Start

Have the destination company decided, and know whether it is genuinely empty. Have a view on how far back you want the transaction history to go — lists come across in full regardless, but the transaction range drives the size of the job. If you are not sure about the range, say so; sizing the source company is what the evaluation is for, and it carries no obligation.