We are aiming to cover all the possible scenarios of your source accounting system when converting it to the new one, nevertheless because the systems subtly vary on how they are handling accounting, it is not always possible to convert everything and for all of your accounting period. Hence it is important you take your time to understand the limitations of our service.
Here we are outlining the limitations for all systems, but there can be more specific depending on your source system.
Learn more about those from conversion limitations page of your source system.
Keep your pre-conversion back-ups and/or exported reports from source system for tax audits
It is important that you keep the backups or extracted reports from the source system in a safe location even after the conversion was done - you might need it for financial audits!
We do not store any pre-conversion backups or source system exports. But, since the conversion in certain cases can not migrate all of the data (especially pertaining to taxes), you might well need the backup or exported reports for the tax or financial audits. Please seek advice from your accountant and/or tax advisor.
Opening balance for transactions outside conversion period
Transactions outside the conversion period will be consolidated into an automatically calculated balance - for both GL accounts, customers and suppliers.
When doing a conversion, often you are not converting all dates that are in the company file. Suppose your company was started in 2012. Dataswitcher will only convert the last two financial years (2018 and 2019). The transactions from 2012 until 2017 will be consolidated into an automatically calculated opening balance.
Dataswitcher creates a special opening balance journal which holds all of your profit and loss consolidated and balance sheet consolidations. In the case of the example above, this journal will be dated on 2017-12-31. This journal will hold a sum of all profit and loss accounts for 2012-2017. Dataswitcher will not consolidate this into the retained earnings for that year. The reason Dataswitcher does not do this, is because it enables us to check the P&L accounts for your systems, making sure there are no discrepancies.
If the profit and loss and balance sheets do not line up, Dataswitcher will add a balance line for retained earnings called undistributed profits.
This means that if you want to check multiple years in your conversion, the Trial Balance between systems will only match, for the years you have bought extra. Examples when your fiscal fiscal year start is January and you convert in April 30th:
1) You do not buy any years and convert in 2020, you will be able to compare TB's for 2018-01-01 until 2020-04-30th
2) You buy 2 additional years and convert in 2020, you will be able to compare TB's for 2016-01-01 until 2020-04-30th
To sum up, you can only run comparative trial balances for the years you have in your conversion. If you want comparative balances for 4 years, you have to buy two additional years.
If you do not want to buy additional years but still want comparative balances, you can break the Dataswitcher opening balance transaction post-conversion into multiple years.
Tax (VAT/GST) will be converted as a line level item
Dataswitcher converts tax (VAT/GST) from the source system, but as a line level item only, since there is no tax classification in QuickBooks Online. This will require an important mandatory one time post-conversion step (see here)! For peace of mind, this also serves as a double-check that your taxes were brought over correctly to QuickBooks Online.
Such approach gives you a higher quality conversion that closes financially.
Click here to learn on how to submit your first tax report.
Next to that, there might be a tax (VAT/GST) wrongly classified (uncleared). If Dataswitcher encounters such an issue in a financial year, we move that balance to the suspense account. Otherwise, this corruption would cause a conversion not to close.
Future transactions
If there are (non-deleted) transactions beyond today (ie. transaction in 2040) this will also be posted by Dataswitcher. There is no end-date possible in a Dataswitcher conversion. The reason behind this, is that these transactions are also added in the ending balances.
We advise you to check whether any future dated transactions exist in your source accounting system and correct where necessary.
Matching journal entries with related credits
We can not match related credits to their respective journal entries. The journal entries will still be posted. However, they will remain unlinked. This mostly happens when you are taking payments on an account for suppliers. Although this is not a mandatory step, we advise you to match these entries in your source accounting system prior to the conversion.
Click here to learn more on matching payments.
Cash basis accounting scheme for taxes
If you use the Cash basis accounting scheme, we advise you to migrate directly after close (and reconciliation) of your most recent tax period. This will avoid additional post-conversion work in the QuickBooks Online.
If your administration uses Cash basis accounting instead of the Standard (non-cash) accounting scheme for taxes, there are some additional post conversion steps. You have to manually change your open invoices after the conversion to include taxes.
If there are some invoices that remain partly paid at the end of your last VAT submission (in your source accounting system) you will need to ensure that the invoice is split. This can be done manually in QuickBooks Online to reflect the open amount and the respective VAT rate to be applied.
Also please make sure you follow the pre-conversion checklist before converting. The reconciliation of the bank is important for Cash basis accounting because this might affect certain tax reports.
Click here to learn more on submitting your first tax report.
Multi-currency
Conversion in multi currency is not supported for all of the source systems at the moment. However, we can still do a conversion in home currency for your company. Please refer to the source system specific checklists to see if it is supported for your system.
Items
If you are migrating from an accounting system that supports items and you would like to migrate them, too, please note the following limitations:
Maximum count
We can migrate only up to 1000 items in a stock because of the limitations in the QBO API. If you have more than that, then please choose the migration without option 'Items and stock'.
You can use the QuickBooks Online items import functionality to import your items after the conversion.
Fields that will be migrated
We are migrating the following fields for the items: code, name, description, purchase cost, price, location, stock, and type.
If your items structure is more complex than that, we advice you to do a manual import.