How to move from QuickBooks Online to desktop accounting software

Why people move back to the desktop

The usual reasons are cost, control and connection. QuickBooks Online raised prices in the summers of 2025 and 2026 (see what it costs now). Some owners want the books on their own computer rather than on a vendor's servers. And some simply work in an office with one or two PCs and never use the phone app.

The move is a little different from leaving QuickBooks Desktop. Desktop has a company file you can copy. QuickBooks Online does not: your books exist only on Intuit's servers, and what you can take away is a set of reports and lists exported to Excel.

What QuickBooks Online lets you export

• Export data: under the gear icon, in the Tools column, Intuit's Export data tool saves a set of reports and lists (customers, vendors, employees) as Excel files in one .zip.
• Any report: every report has an export button that saves it to Excel. This is how you get the reports the Export data tool does not include.
• Lists: the customer, vendor and products and services lists each have their own export icon.
• Attachments: receipts and documents you attached are exported separately, from the Attachments list, as a .zip.

What does not come with you: bank connections and rules, user logins, and anything only stored in an app connected to QuickBooks. Intuit keeps a cancelled company available read-only for a year, but do the exports while your subscription is active.

Lists only, or full history?

There are two sensible ways to move.

• Lists and open balances. Bring over the chart of accounts, customers, vendors and products, every balance as of a start date, and the invoices and bills still open on that date. Old transactions stay in QuickBooks Online (and in your exported reports) for reference. This is quick, and it is what most accountants suggest at a year-end.
• Full history. Bring over every transaction too, so registers, the general ledger and reports in the new program cover past periods. This takes more exports and more checking, and works best into a new company file starting at the beginning of a fiscal year.

Pick the start date first. The first day of your fiscal year is cleanest; the first day of a quarter is the next best, because payroll and sales tax returns break there.

The reports to run

Run them all for the same dates, and check the trial balance totals before you leave.

Bringing it into AcboBooks

AcboBooks has a QuickBooks Online option in Migrate from QuickBooks. You load the files all at once: Excel (.xlsx or .xls), CSV, attachments, or the .zip as it downloaded. It recognises each file from its contents, so the file names do not matter, and it shows what each file was read as, and how many rows, before anything is imported.

• Lists and open balances brings the accounts, customers, vendors and products, every balance from the trial balance, and each open invoice and unpaid bill as of your start date.
• Full history also brings every transaction in the Journal report, each on its own date with its number, names and accounts. Bills, bill payments, checks, expenses and card charges come across as real documents. Invoices, sales receipts and customer payments do too if you load Sales by Customer Detail, and paychecks if you load Payroll Details. Anything else comes across as a journal entry.
• Estimates, open purchase orders, tax rates, recurring templates, budgets, reconciled status and attachments come across too when you load those exports. Attachments go into the Doc Center.
• If Payroll Details shows only total taxes, AcboBooks works out Social Security and Medicare at the standard rates and tells you; add the individual tax columns to the report for exact figures.

It works for both US and Canadian QuickBooks Online companies.

After the move

1. Compare the trial balance in AcboBooks with the one you exported, as of the same date. They should match to the cent.
2. Compare A/R and A/P customer by customer and vendor by vendor.
3. Reconcile the bank for the first month in the new program. See how to reconcile a bank account.
4. Check payroll year-to-date totals per employee before the next payroll.
5. Keep the exports. Save the .zip and every report in a folder you back up. They are your record of the QuickBooks Online years.

Our moving checklist and migration page have more detail. AcboBooks runs on Windows 10 and 11 and imports your bank's statement file rather than connecting live, so check that fits before you cancel. The 15-day trial is the place to test a real import: download it.

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