The QuickBooks Desktop migration runs once per company. That is deliberate: a second import does not merge with the first, it replaces it — every imported transaction is deleted and rebuilt from the new file, which would also throw away any corrections you had made in the meantime. So the tidying is worth doing in QuickBooks, before you run the extractor, rather than afterward.
It is not a big job. Most of what people assume they need to fix, they don't — that half is at the bottom, and it is the more useful half.
First: print your numbers
Before you change anything, run these three in QuickBooks and save them as PDFs:
- Balance Sheet, as of today
- Profit & Loss, All Dates
- Trial Balance, as of today
This is the single most valuable step here, and it takes two minutes. When the import finishes you will want to check it against something, and "something" needs to be the numbers as they were at the moment you extracted. Do it first, because the cleanup below will change some of them.
Then: the four that matter
1. Merge duplicate accounts
If your chart has both Shipping and Shipping Expense, or three variations on Office Supplies
collected over the years, merge them in QuickBooks now.
SalesImporter matches an incoming account to one already in your chart by name — capitalization doesn't matter, but everything else does. Two accounts with different names are two different accounts as far as the import is concerned, and it will not guess that you meant them to be one. Merging afterward means re-categorizing every transaction on the losing account by hand.
In QuickBooks Desktop, you merge two accounts by editing one and renaming it to exactly match the other; QuickBooks then offers to merge them. They have to be the same account type and at the same level in the chart.
2. Make dead accounts, customers, vendors and items inactive
QuickBooks won't let you delete anything with history, but it will let you mark it inactive, and that carries across — an inactive account arrives inactive and stays out of your dropdowns.
Worth doing for the vendor you used once in 2019 and the six items you stopped selling. It costs nothing and it is the difference between a usable Chart of Accounts and one you have to scroll.
3. Clear out stale open invoices and unpaid bills
This one has real consequences for your numbers. The import reads your Open Invoices and Unpaid Bills reports and reconciles them against what it posted, so anything sitting on those reports arrives as a genuine receivable or payable.
An invoice from three years ago that you wrote off in your head but never wrote off in QuickBooks will land in your Accounts Receivable as money someone still owes you. Write it off, or void it, before you extract.
If the two sides don't agree exactly, the import posts the difference to Opening Balance Equity and tells you it did — it will not quietly bury a gap.
4. Run Verify Data
File → Utilities → Verify Data in QuickBooks. If it reports damage, run Rebuild Data before you extract. A damaged company file exports damaged data, and that is a problem much better caught here than halfway through an import.
What you do not need to do
This is where the afternoons go, so it is worth being specific.
Don't reorganize your chart to match ours. Every real QuickBooks account type maps to a SalesImporter equivalent — bank, A/R, A/P, credit card, fixed asset, long-term liability, equity, income, other income, cost of goods sold, expense, other expense, and the rest. The only thing skipped is non-posting accounts, which are the ones behind estimates, sales orders and purchase orders. They hold no money, so nothing is lost.
Don't trim your history to make the import smaller. There is no date limit. Fourteen years comes across as readily as one. (If you are thinking of the 90, 120 or 180 days on your plan — that is the marketplace order sync, which is a different thing entirely and doesn't apply here.)
Don't worry about your closing date. SalesImporter records what QuickBooks says it is, but it does not lock anything or refuse anything on the strength of it.
Don't fix miscategorized transactions one at a time first. Imported transactions stay fully editable in SalesImporter — date, description, accounts and amounts — which is not true of marketplace or bank-synced data. Fixing them here is no harder than fixing them there, and you'll have the imported chart in front of you while you do it.
Don't close QuickBooks or cancel your subscription yet. Keep the file until you have checked the import against those three reports you printed.
If you have more than one Accounts Receivable account
Some companies carry several — one per region, or one left over from an old setup. QuickBooks' own aging reports don't distinguish between them, so the import reconciles against the account named exactly Accounts Receivable and treats that as your main one. If your real A/R lives somewhere else under a different name, rename it before you extract so the reconciliation lands on the right account. The same applies to Accounts Payable.
When you're ready
Open Import in the sidebar, generate your upload code, and run the extractor on the computer QuickBooks is installed on with the company file open. It uploads on its own when it finishes.
Then check the result against your three PDFs. If anything looks off, say so before you start working in the new books — that is the moment when it is cheapest to fix.