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Almost every file has one, and it is usually holding transactions nobody resolved. We surface the balance and its contents rather than carrying it across as a mystery account.
Migration · QuickBooks Online
QuickBooks Online has a real API, which makes the extraction straightforward and the mapping the hard part. Most of the work in this conversion is deciding what your chart of accounts should have been — and proving, period by period, that what we loaded agrees with what you filed.
Company size, entity count, and what is in the file. We come back with a scope, a price, and a timeline.
The mapping
The agent reads your posted history to infer what each account is actually used for, then proposes a target structure. Anything it cannot justify is held rather than guessed.
QuickBooks quirks
None of these are QuickBooks failing. They are what happens when a system is used for eight years by a growing business — and they are the things a generic conversion carries across unexamined.
Almost every file has one, and it is usually holding transactions nobody resolved. We surface the balance and its contents rather than carrying it across as a mystery account.
QuickBooks lets a company exist as a customer and a vendor with different spellings. We match on tax ID, remit-to, and history, and hand you the ambiguous ones.
Classes often encode department, location, and entity at once because there was nowhere else to put them. Splitting that into real dimensions is the highest-value part of the conversion.
A frequent source of cash variance. We reconcile the balance and its constituent receipts before anything loads rather than after.
QuickBooks has no real fixed-asset subledger, so the schedule usually lives outside it. We bring the schedule in with cost, accumulated depreciation, method, and remaining life.
A closing date password is not the same as a locked period. We check whether prior periods actually changed after closing, which is a conversation worth having before conversion.
A single-entity QuickBooks Online conversion with two years of history runs three to four weeks from kickoff to cutover and is priced at $18,000. Multi-entity conversions with intercompany history start at $45,000 and take six to ten weeks depending on how the entities have been kept.
The distribution of effort surprises people. Extraction is a few days — the API is good. Mapping and review take about half the elapsed time, because they require decisions from your controller rather than work from us. Reconciliation takes the rest, and it is the part we will not compress.
Faster: one entity, a chart of accounts under 200 lines, classes used consistently, and a controller who can commit half a day a week. Slower: multiple company files that need consolidating, heavy use of sub-customers as a project workaround, inventory tracked in QuickBooks, and payroll history that needs to reconcile to filed returns.
The single biggest variable is not data volume. It is whether the chart of accounts has been maintained or accumulated. A 900-line chart where half the accounts have not been posted to since 2021 is more work than ten times the transaction volume on a clean one.
The shadow ledger has been reconciling against this QuickBooks file daily for months, so most of this work is already done and evidenced. Cutover in that case is a $6,000 engagement and about a week, because the reconciliation gate has been passing continuously rather than needing to be established.
Questions
A read-only connection produces a proposed chart of accounts and a first variance report inside a week.