Switch accounting software without losing your history.

Carry across what runs the business; archive the rest.

The mistake that makes migrations drag is trying to re-key years of transactions. The new books do not need them. They need the position on one date — what you own, what you owe, who owes you and what is on the shelf — plus the documents that are still open. Everything before that date stays readable in the old system or in its exports, which is where an auditor or a tax office will look for it anyway.

So the work is five steps: export from the old system, map your chart of accounts once, load the opening position, run both systems side by side for a week, and switch on a month end.

• Chart of accounts, mapped once to your structure
• Trial balance on the cut-over date as the opening entry
• Open customer invoices and supplier bills, one by one
• Stock on hand per branch at its cost
• Customers, suppliers and products from CSV

The opening balance entry, worked.

On the cut-over date, run the trial balance in the old system. Every balance-sheet account becomes one line of the opening entry; what is left over — the owners’ stake — lands in opening balance equity. Here the bank holds $12,000, customers owe $18,500, stock is worth $30,000 at cost and equipment $6,500 net; the business owes suppliers $9,000 and the bank $10,000. The entry foots at $67,000 on both sides.

Receivables and payables are not loaded as two round numbers. They come in as the 14 invoices and 9 bills that make them up, so the control accounts, the ageing report and the customer statements all agree on day one — and a payment received next week settles the right invoice.

What to export, whatever you are leaving.

Every accounting system can produce the same four things, and they are all you need: the trial balance on the cut-over date, the open receivables, the open payables, and lists of customers, suppliers and products with stock. The menus differ; the outputs do not.

• QuickBooks, Xero, Zoho Books, Wave, FreshBooks: trial balance and open A/R and A/P reports, plus contact and item lists as CSV
• Odoo: any list exports to CSV or Excel, including on-hand stock per warehouse
• Tally and Manager.io: trial balance and ledger exports to Excel
• Spreadsheets: one sheet each for customers, suppliers and products with stock, and a balance sheet on the cut-over date

A week side by side, then switch on a month end.

For one week, record sales and purchases in both systems and compare the daily totals and the trial balance. Differences surface while both sets of books are in front of you, not at year end. Then cut over on the first of a month, so every report has a clean boundary — and keep the old system read-only for history.

Switching in the middle of the year works the same way: either carry the year to date in as one summary journal per month, so the year’s profit and loss stays complete in the new books, or start the new year clean in Nonari and close the old year where it began.

We load the first numbers with you.

Send us your trial balance and customer list as a spreadsheet and we will load them into your account with you on a short call, so you start from your real numbers instead of an empty screen.