How to export everything from QuickBooks Online before you cancel

Two ways to export

QuickBooks Online has no company file you can take away. Everything leaves as reports and lists, usually in Excel. Intuit gives you two ways to get them.

• Export data. Go to Settings ⚙ → Export data (under Tools). Pick a reason, set the date range on the Reports tab, switch on the reports and lists you want, and choose Export to Excel. You get one .zip with an Excel file for each. Intuit says this covers posting transactions: invoices, receipts and bills, anything that changes a balance.
• One report at a time. Open the report under Reports, set its date, and use Export/Print → Export to Excel. This is the way to get a report as of a particular day, which is what a clean switch needs.

Do both: the .zip as your archive, and the individual reports as the set you'll actually move. Sign in as an admin, so nothing is hidden from you. Intuit moves its menus around now and then; if one isn't where we say, search for the report's name under Reports.

The lists

The reports, and the dates to run them for

Pick your switch date first: the first day the new program takes over. Everything before it stays in QuickBooks Online's numbers; everything from it on goes into the new books. Then run these:

Use the aging detail reports, not Open Invoices or Unpaid Bills. Open Invoices and Unpaid Bills show what is open today, even if you set an earlier date. If a customer paid last week, an Open Invoices report "as of" last month leaves that invoice out, and your A/R won't match the trial balance. The aging detail reports are true as of the day you choose.

Export them together. If someone enters a backdated invoice between your trial balance export and your aging export, the two won't agree. Do the whole set in one sitting, with nobody else working in the file.

Payroll, sales tax and the rest

• Payroll Details for this calendar year, with each tax in its own column (Customize). Without that, you only see total taxes per paycheck. Also download every filed form: 941s, 940, W-2s and state returns in the US; remittance records, T4s and ROEs in Canada.
• Sales tax. The Sales Tax Liability Report in the US; in Canada, Taxes → Reports → Transactions by tax code for All Dates. Download your filed returns as well.
• Estimates and purchase orders. These don't post, so the Export data tool misses them. Intuit points to the Sales transactions and Expense transactions lists (filter by type, then Export to Excel), or the Estimates by Customer and Open Purchase Order Detail reports.
• Attachments. Settings → Attachments, select them all, Batch actions → Export. They download as a .zip.
• Budgets. The Budget Overview report.
• Reconciled status. Transaction Detail by Account, All Dates, with the Cleared column added. It records which transactions you already ticked off against a statement.
• Bank rules. Accounting → Rules → New rule ▼ → Export rules saves them to Excel. Few programs read that file, but it's a handy list when you set your rules up again.

What doesn't export

Some things don't leave QuickBooks Online as data at all. Plan to redo them, or keep a copy for reference:

• Invoice designs. Save a PDF of one invoice, estimate and statement so you can match the look in the new program.
• Users and permissions. Write down who has access and what they can do.
• Which payment paid which invoice. The reports show payments and invoices, but not the link between them in a form other software can read. Your new program has to work it out from amounts.
• Custom reports. Save the ones you rely on as PDFs, with their settings noted.
• Bank connections and connected apps. These have to be set up again on the other side.
• Invoices as PDFs in bulk. We found no bulk PDF export in Intuit's help. Save the ones you'll need, such as open invoices, one by one.
• Pay schedules, deductions and benefits as settings. The amounts are on the paychecks; the setup isn't.

Bringing the files into AcboBooks

If you are moving to AcboBooks, the importer is under Company → Import from QuickBooks. Load every file at once, or the .zip as it is. AcboBooks recognises each file by its title and column headings, not its name, and shows what it found. Then choose:

• Lists and open balances: accounts, customers, vendors, products, each balance from the trial balance, and every open invoice and bill from the aging reports, as of your start date.
• Full history: also every transaction in the Journal on its own date. Bills, bill payments, checks, expenses and card charges become real documents; invoices and payments too if you load Sales by Customer Detail; paychecks too with Payroll Details.

Before anything is posted, AcboBooks lists what is still needed (for example, a trial balance for the day before the history starts) and warns when the files don't add up with each other. After the import it compares every account with your QuickBooks Online trial balance and shows matches or differs by, with an Undo import button. It also reads the Employee Details, Recurring Template List, Budget Overview, sales tax, estimates (totals only, as QuickBooks Online's report has no lines), open purchase orders, Cleared column and attachments.

It doesn't bring over bank rules, invoice designs, users, pay schedules or deductions, and product bundles come across as their separate items. We built and tested the importer on real QuickBooks Online exports, including a real Canadian company's files, but your files are your own: check the result as our tie-out guide describes.

QuickBooks® is a registered trademark of Intuit Inc. AcboBooks is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Intuit.

Frequently asked questions