01.21.2025 - Best Practices for Transferring QB Data

Join us for a session of tools to use move QuickBooks Online data to another QBO subscription

CPE offered through Earmark - Check on the channel here: https://bit.ly/QBPHCPE

QB Power Hour is a free, biweekly webinar series for accountants, ProAdvisors, CPAs, bookkeepers and QuickBooks consultants presented by Michelle Long, CPA and Dan DeLong who are very passionate about the industry, QuickBooks and apps that integrate with QuickBooks.

Watch or listen to all of the QB Power Hours at https://www.qbpowerhour.com/blog 

Register for upcoming webinars at https://www.qbpowerhour.com/

00:00 Introduction to QB Power Hour
00:25 Earning CPE Credits with Earmark App
01:33 Casual Conversation and Updates
04:13 Discussing QuickBooks Data Migration
06:16 Presenters' Introductions
07:51 Housekeeping and CPE Credit Details
10:43 Considerations for Starting a New Subscription
16:16 Challenges and Solutions in Data Migration
25:58 Using QuickBooks Online Backup Service
29:58 Chronobooks and QuickBooks Online Advanced
30:36 Backup Service Details and Restore Points
31:28 Transactional and List Data Backup
32:32 API Functionality and Data Entitlements
33:09 Payroll Backup and Financial Impact
34:41 Backup and Restore Services Overview
35:52 Challenges with Cloud Backups
43:36 Third-Party Backup Applications
48:15 Import Export Tools and Their Nuances
53:12 Round Tripping: QuickBooks Online to Desktop
56:27 Final Thoughts and Recommendations

Transcript

01.21.25_-_best_practices_for_transferring_your_quickbooks_data_21_Jan_2025_restream: 0:30

How are you? And and, and how is how are the, can you give us an update on the, on the southern, southern The fires yeah, you know, it seems like California is always a hot mess. So a quick shout out to all of my SoCal people out here Hopefully those who I know are all okay so far if I'm missing somebody don't know about it I you know, please let us know how we can help you. There's stuff in San Diego at the moment for me Ventura I've been okay. The the winds are always a lot of fun, but we're good I've always felt there needs to be a community thing where we can post where Everybody lives city wise. So when there's any kind of a disaster of any sort, we have a better concept of who we need to reach out to with where they're at to help support each other. So but thank you for asking, of course. So appreciate it. I'm I'm headed in the smoky direction. We are currently in in, in San Jose, California headed south. People are like, what are you doing driving towards that? But it is a, it is a big, a big big area and you're actually how far how far from the epicenter of of all that's going on. So I live in Ventura, which I always love to describe. It's right between Malibu and Santa Barbara on the beach. I'm about 40 miles north of where a lot of the Pacific Palisades and a lot of stuff is going on. So this time around, I've been. You know, nice and comfortable and safe. We had some fires not too long ago in Camarillo. It just, we get the I always feel silly talking about it because we have these Santa Ana winds, which is nothing in comparison to hurricanes or tornadoes and the craziness, but I guess we all have our own versions of the, the craziness of the world that can impact you at times. And just Right. Take away your brain focus for sure. That's one of the things I liked about living in Arizona is that a lot of those natural disasters of earthquakes, you know, we had the occasional wildfire, which, you know, was typically delegated to the mountains. But not like, you know. In, in yeah, it's not, we didn't have flooding, we didn't have, you know, all these crazy things that, that are, but now all bets are off. I mean, you have, you have these things all over the place. We, there was a tornado that, that occurred in, in Arizona. Last summer like oh my goodness. This is crazy. Speaking of tornadoes. We're actually gonna be talking about one today that's a masterful tornado that seems to impact all of us right, which is the The migration or the copy of company file, which that's the worst natural disaster, but I digress Put a one in the chat. Yeah, I've lost my mouse. There it is. Okay. All right So let me go ahead and share my screen. So we'll get started on the on the power hour so today we're gonna be talking about QuickBooks data magic, best practices for transferring your QuickBooks online data, which maybe one of the best practices is don't do it. But by the time we're done here, we may actually come to that conclusion. But, working add into it for however long that I that I did, I always was a little bit. Surprised by the answer that a lot of people gave was, well, just start another company five and and it's very drastic and but it's, it's often the most simplest thing to. To do when when faced with, you know, an undocumented program feature, or glitch as a, as a feature is what you called it the last session. I think there was a unintended feature. Yeah. I love that one. So we're going to, we're going to unpack a few. A few ways that you can actually do that starting a new company file and maybe copying from one one QuickBooks online subscription to another. And we'll, we'll kind of unpack a few of those ways to, to do that. And the puts and takes that that go along with that, because as we're, as we're going to unpack. There's no silver bullet when it comes to just starting over in a new QuickBooks Online subscription. So a little bit of a round the horn here. My name is Dan DeLong, owner at Dan Witt and the School of Bookkeeping. Worked that into it for nearly 18 years, co hosting today, also at Workshop Wednesdays over at the School of Bookkeeping. How am I sounding? I got a new headset. I, I I wanna be a little bit more, booming. You sound horrible. You need more treble. Take the bass out please so I don't sound quite as bad. No, you're fine. Good. You're good. The, the baritone of of, of QuickBooks and the tenor. What, what are you, that is your vocal range. I don't do acapella, so I don't know for sure, but I am Matthew. My friends call me spot Fulton founder of Parkway business solutions, also kind of known as cloud apps, Inc. Now creator of QB community, like the Facebook group. Really happy to be a big, big part of, you know. Taking part of these QB power hours now and you got to be honest. This is one of the topics where when we discuss it ahead of time, I think you and I talked for well over an hour of just the things we could talk about. And Dan had to remind me that this isn't time to squirrel off and it's power hour, not power week, like day or week. So there's deeper details. We can maybe go into that a different session, of course. So yeah, there's there's plenty of weeds that we can find ourselves in even just on one of these topics. So hopefully We can, we can get through get through these, these three major ways to to do things and we'll save some time for questions at the, at the end here. So a little bit about the housekeeping here. So every where every other Tuesday at noon Eastern, we are now eligible for CPE credit on all QB power hours, starting actually December, December 3rd. However, there's a catch, as you saw Blake talking about that. It's not live CPE credit. It is post webinar CPE credit. So you can always go to the the channel that we have on Earmark. So this particular, We will, we will still have polling questions, unlike what Blake was saying there. We still have polling questions just because we want to know what you're thinking, but it doesn't count for participation in the, in the live webinar. Five, seven days after today, they will post the, the course on earmark, and then you can take those quiz questions there, and that's what qualifies you for the hour CPE credit. But we don't we don't certainly want you to go running off and and expecting the, the CPE credit or wondering where the, where the course is that shows up. About five, seven days after the live webinar. So, but you can go to the earmark channel or the QB power hour, if you like in, in review any of the other ones that are up there and get a CP hour for those. But bear in mind that those there'll be there. If you don't want the the PDFs of the slides, the past recordings, podcasts, and other resources, we have qppowerhour. com slash resources for that. And today's today's handouts are in the chat. Thank you. Yep. All right, and we have a couple of housekeeping. So if you have specific questions about things that we're going to be talking about here today, please put them in the Q& A. That gives us a better handle on addressing anything that we might be able to do live or, or following up with because Chats, they they tend to tend to scroll in, but if you just happen to have something to say about There's a blizzard warning in Florida. Wait a minute. A blizzard warning in Florida? We're in the upside down, man. I think I know I know You know, it is what it is, but right. I'm sure it's sunny and balmy in Maine Well, I actually when I saw it I wanted to be rude and like Today's a shorts and a t shirt kind of day for me But I thought it'd be really rude for all of our friends out there that are suffering in the cold So yeah i'll keep the house nice and warm and suffer with you guys to feel better All right. We do have the qb power hour store. You want to check that out if you if you so desire So let's let's unpack what we're going to be talking about here today. So to move or not to move? That is the question. We're going very Shakespearean here. Whether or not and we'll, we'll talk about some of the considerations when to start a new subscription, and then copying data in advance. So there actually is in QuickBooks Online Advanced, we'll talk about how there is a way to copy the data. Using QuickBooks Online Advanced, going to and from QuickBooks Online Advanced. And then we'll talk about, well, what about everybody else? Somebody, everybody else who's not on in advance. There are some import, export tools. And we'll talk about the API limitations of such. And then A tip of the cat to not tip of the cat, tip of the hat to desktop because we, we do want to always talk about all the things and QuickBooks desktop is, is an option now. So we, and then hopefully if time time permits, we'll have some Q and A and, and maybe go into a demo of some of these things if need be. 47 degrees in florida. What is? Okay, so I I actually want as we're talking because it's fun to do this Everybody put your temperature in and I want to see who's got the lowest and who's got the highest at the moment and right And the line is nine minus nine wins. Never mind Okay. No, i'm not gonna go check them. So and everything has to be in fahrenheit if there's anybody from canada Don't make any conversions, please like that's too tough And while we're doing that, I'll launch the first first poll question, which is, has you, have you ever had to start over in QuickBooks online or, or been given that as the solution by, by talking to to Intuit. Linda's here. Deborah. I used to live on Bainbridge Island up there. Enjoy that cold. I'm glad I'm in California Yeah, it's I don't know about all that stuff. Ah, so Dan, have you ever done one of these if you have to start over? Yes in the in and we'll talk about some of the The reasons why, but the biggest one that I see is, oftentimes there is, a discount especially in the, the nonprofit space. Right. So you know, there's a company called tech soup, is the recipient of donated subscriptions from, from Intuit. That is all part of their, you know, we care of your back. They want to, give some some subscriptions and then TechSoup basically confirms that the organization is a legitimate nonprofit 501c3 or 501 whatever they need to, they need to prove and document that they are eligible. And it's not just QuickBooks, but you know, Microsoft Office and other, apps and, and software solutions that, that, nonprofits need to, to run their business. They pay, pennies on the dollar when it comes to you know, the QuickBooks online subscription. I believe the advanced is 150 for a year. Which is wow, I wish I could score some of those, but, Can I create a non profit where I do this for other for profit businesses to get, no, I'm sorry, just kidding. Right, we're just going to resell, no, we're not going to do that. But that's that's often one of the situations, like, okay, they've been using advanced for a while. And oh, here comes this tech soup into the mix, where they could, you know, potentially save a lot of money by transitioning from their paid subscription to a, a tech soup very deeply discounted and there can be other discounts and, and, you know, things like that, Or, well, I mean, what, what do you what are your thoughts about that? As we kind of close this out and we've got a slide that kind of talks about some of these as well. I did want to ask you a real quick question because a couple people have asked this and I don't know it. Handouts for prior Power Hours, do you put those on your website also with the, the session? Yeah, so there is yeah, there, if you go to the qppowerhour. com slash resources, there is a link to the OneDrive that, that has all of them. And I as you said that, I realized I didn't do that today, and we have a folder for each year. So that link, I'll have to look at that link and see if that is pointing to the right the right folder. And it may be looking at. You know, 2024 or some older years, so I'll, I'll double check on that. But yes, we do have reach out and we can help all of them, right? So incidentally, you can go to, the particular landing page or the replay link for that, that particular episode and those handouts should be there for, for that particular one as well. Awesome. I lost my mouse again. We'll close that down to some of the other things we're gonna go to the slide and one of the things we talked about is reasons to do this. One of them that I was talking about is, we always like to do a backup to desktop when we are, letting go of a client or we're off boarding a client. Or another option is if you're going to have to go through an audit and you only want to provide a certain amount of information. And like all of these, it's, there's got to be a good qualified reason to do it because it's not like it's a super quick, easy way to do it. So consider the time involved to do it and charge appropriately for, for your time to do that. So we mentioned a little bit about TechSoup. It could be, you know, I'm using my firm bill discount and that's part of my service offerings or something along those lines. And they've already had their own subscription. Or maybe you need a second copy or maybe testing things out in a sandbox. Right. So if you've got a company and you want to actually figure out what's the right apps to use for workflow, Oh, and you want to be, or even if you want to train them on how to use the software and you don't want to ruin everything, having a secondary copy with some of their data sometimes is a nice thing to do. They can play around. You don't ever have to worry about them messing up your stuff and you keep working on your project. Or training new people. Right. Maybe don't maybe don't giving them keys to the castle, so to speak of you know, go ahead and do this. And, you know, maybe it's a an onboarding, right? Like we'll, we'll give a couple, a couple of clients that. This is a copy of their data. Well, you can't, you know, that that's a challenge with QuickBooks online. If it's, it's redundantly backed up, meaning that, you know, as soon as you enter something into QuickBooks, it's saved all over the place. So maybe creating a couple copies of your, of your clients, putting them in trials or things like that. So you can give a new, new staff, something to to work in with real data rather than You know, logging into Craig's landscaping. And as soon as you close out, it's gone. The last one you have here in primary admin issues. I wanted to touch base on real quick, cause this is one that impacted me dramatically, without going too deep. I used to have a business partner and the way we had set it up, it was his business initially. When you set up a firm, you want to set up the, the, for your QuickBooks online accountant, especially you should set that up as a, like. Accounting at company, whatever, and then always add even the partners and as employees and give them access. So that way, if anybody ever has to leave that firm, you don't have to worry about who has the primary admin and trying to get things switched over, because I can tell you, it's really, really difficult and challenging to do it. I know it's a little bit different than what you were saying there, but it's super important to know that part. Yeah. I mean, and this is, this is one of those things that we talked about this on the prior Power Hour when we were talking about the Intuit login issues, right, where to Intuit, the primary admin is the first user to step into that subscription, right? And that could be, you know, to this last point here, something that was delegated to an employee who the employee has left, right? So, when the primary admin is not available, right, where they're not They're not being cooperative or they're not available anymore, or the email is defunct or, or any of those, you know, fill in the blank of those reasons why the primary admin's not there. Or they just got a chip on their shoulder and they're, they're being nasty. That's, that's quite possible too. All of those reasons you know, I've had many a call where they're like, well, you know. The primary admin is the accountant, because they're doing firm, firm based and oftentimes I, I would hear their sob story and often wonder, well, what is the other side of the story, right? Yeah, because not, not, you know, just because somebody is telling you something doesn't mean it's always true. But it could be. And I remember talking to an accountant who was like, this customer is not paying my bill and this is my only leverage is holding on to this primary admin, you know, sort of thing where, you know, they would, they would call in and say, Hey, Yeah, this is my company, this is my data, this is my sort of thing. So there, there's always that potential of, you know, there's a reason other than the fact that they're a jerk. It's not always an opportunity for a fresh start, right? Maybe it was just saw an opportunity for a fresh start, who knows, but yeah. And that's something that I would say, it was like, well, if you're a company admin, you can take your data and go home, you know, and bring it to bring it down to desktop and then bring it up to, to a new subscription. If you really. Wanted to, but as we're going to unpack there's, there's, there's a big butt. All right. Oh, there we go. Another, there's the unresponsive one. So pretty good there. All right. But wait a minute, timeout. There's some considerations when not to move, right? Okay. What if they're using QuickBooks online payroll? As we'll, as we'll unpack there, there's a lot of things that Don't happen when that's the case, or maybe it's they're using inventory, or attachments the bank feeds, QuickBooks payments, third party apps, oh, the list goes on and on. Maybe they had some existing discounts. Right now, and we're going to go a little bit deeper on some of this stuff. We're trying to touch base onto it because there's obviously quite a few different, each one of these, each one of these things we can go into deeper of how you can address and fix it. So even though there are a challenge, there's still a workaround, but again, operate like what's the value of doing all of this work, right? You know, is it, is it worth. You know, the 150 a year savings for, you know, because they're going for tech soup or is there going to be more work for them to actually move that, move that data? Let's talk about Matt, you want to talk through some of these things? I noticed. Somebody said that the slides on the go for that one. And I'll take care of these. So, you know, I, I'm a firm believer when you start to go through this process. And if you're trying to save a company money, you need to do a little bit of a pushback and ask some questions. And we all know when you ask them, do you really need a complete copy? Like, do you really need hit all the historical data? The knee jerk is always going to be, I need everything. Always. You need to go a little further and be like. Do you really, though, like when was the last time you actually looked further back and how long back did you go? By finding those things out, asking those why's a little bit deeper, you're going to determine if you need a full copy. If it's a cleanup job, maybe it does make sense to do like start all over which way to go about it. That then leads into AR, AP, open balances. There's ways that if you're not creating a, like, if you don't need an actual full copy, like you're changing subscription wise, there'll be easier ways to go about it. And other thing you have to take into consideration is when you have third party applications, what data, when you connect it. Because this is a situation where you have a QuickBooks online company file. It's already connected to a third party app. You're going to disconnect it and reconnect it to a new one. So what information might sink and muddy the waters? And you need to understand that when you start to do that as part of your process. And then last but not least, you really want to talk about the timeline of doing all these things. Because doing the different ways you're talking about doing this, it's going to take time. Is somebody going to be working in the file at the same time? The worst thing ever is having moving walls. So if somebody's trying to work in the file while you're trying to rebuild something, just don't do it. It's just not worth it. So you have to create a phased approach where it's a, you start the first one of, okay, we're going to do, if they're in the file and they're doing stuff, we're going to do everything all the way up to this date. So, like, as of last year, do everything all the way to that point, you guys can't touch anything there. They keep doing their work, and it's understood that it's going to take time for that first part. So, let's say it takes a month or two. Phase two then becomes doing the rest of the stuff, and then phase three is the training and so forth. So, you really want to make sure you're, you're documenting that, figuring that out as your scope of work, and it's understood, so it doesn't lead to more problems. Otherwise, you're going to have a lot of threads to pull you're not going to get paid for. Yeah, and especially when if somebody's working on it at the same time trying to compare you know, run your reports just to confirm, yes, this worked or no, it didn't is going to be infinite, infinitely more, more complicated. So I did I did republish the post. So those of you that weren't able to see the right, The handouts on the website that should be Should be should be good. If not, I will do that immediately following and you'll have the slides there. All right All right. So let's talk a little bit about the copying with the online backup service So in QuickBooks Online Advanced, you know going back to the going into the Wayback Machine when QuickBooks Online Advanced came out in 2018. There was A couple, there was a couple, online backup services. And we want to talk a little bit about, you know, backing a backup as a, as, as a verb and backup as a, as a noun. So QuickBooks online for all versions is redundantly backed up, meaning that as soon as you hit save on something the theory is that. As soon as you hit save, it is saved in multiple clouds or multiple data centers, wherever wherever that data is, is saved through Intuit, which I think, I believe now they're using Amazon Web Services before they had their own, you know, data centers but now they're, they're actually leveraging the, the Amazon Web Services. So there's in the cloud. Wherever that cloud happens to be, there are multiple clouds and your data is redundantly backed up on those on those clouds for security, right? So if you have Or stability, I should say, not necessarily security. Stability is the right word, right? Because, as I was doing research around this, as we'll see trying to provide other solutions, Intuit goes by like a shared responsibility aspect of this. There's a more appropriate term, which I'm not getting exactly right, but what that means is the fact that they back up the data doesn't mean they are responsible or liable for giving it back to you. So if there was ever an issue, You could still have to pay somebody to rebuild everything. Their backups is specific to their need to be able to like do something. It's not a, Hey, something happened and I need to go further back. Yeah. So so that means that if data center that you, wherever, wherever you were accessing the cloud to your QuickBooks online data, if that is no longer accessible, there is a fail safe, meaning that. That same sales receipt that you recorded moments ago would be available on that other redundantly backed up data set, right? So you wouldn't see that loss of that data. That's a theory. I'm sure, you know, the chat's probably like, well, wait, I had this happen or I had anything like that. I mean, there's tons of times where, you know, it's not, it doesn't work street, you know, perfect. But. That is the, that is the theory. So Chronobooks was a, was an app that backed up the, the online data, but gave you that restore point functionality where you could say, Oh, this was horrible. I need to go back to yesterday. I don't want that sales receipt that I just saved. I want yesterday because I had fill in the blank, right? Like I, I had, somebody come in and, You know, enter in a whole bunch of data. We imported a whole bunch of stuff from a third party app and that's no longer necessary or I want to go back to yesterday that this allows you to do that. So into it in its infinite wisdom acquired said company, because rather than rather than you know. Build a rebuild the wheel. Let's let's buy somebody else's wheel and we'll, we'll, we'll attach it to to our cart. And, For whatever reason, they decided to only have, give that an option for the QuickBooks Online Advanced, right? So Chronobooks, which was a a third party app that could be used for all versions, now only works with with QuickBooks Online Advanced, but it's bundled in with the subscription price. So whatever, You know, backup service and we'll talk about some of the other ones that are that are out there for for other versions you don't have to pay the app cost for that if you're using quickbooks online advance, but it's not automatic you have to opt into it No pun intended You have to turn it on in order for the backup to start. but what it does is it allows you to choose the, you know, from multiple restore points. And Matt, you were saying that it keeps them for a year. Yeah. There's another slide a little bit deeper, which I didn't actually know that until I started doing a deeper research onto this. It will retain the information for the last, it says the last. One year. And it actually says one year of time. So the question is, we're talking about as of today, one year, 365 days back is what they're saying with any of the different restore points, you can, you can access it and use it. So after that, you would, you, all the older ones are gone. I do have some questions. If you were trying to back up further, it takes a whole snapshot. So that should just be the, the, the basic answer to it, I guess. One year. So, all right. So. Let's talk about what gets backed up because devil's always in the details, right? So you've got transactional data invoices, estimates, sales, and receipts. I'm not sure what's the difference between a sales and a, and a receipt, because I was thinking sales receipts because I read them back to back, but I assume that's. Receipts, meaning the attachments, but they're mentioned over here in other data. So I guess, I'm not sure what this means expenses, because that's not, that's not laid out in the transactional data. But that, so most of the transactional data, is backed up, your list data. Most of them is backed up, but even the other data of attachments company information, not sure what entitlements mean, because when I think entitlements, I when I hear entitlements, I, I think of Social Security and Medicare, but What other entitlement? Let's talk about back end functionality. So some of the, what this all has to do with is what's available through the API. And a little bit later down, part of what we do, on each of these slides you'll see there's a reference link you can go to and see where we got this from, of course. But it's, the question becomes, what can you actually access through the API or not? So with their API, entitlement is considering like what features and functionality is turned on or not automatically for you inside of the setup. Makes sense. How many? And then exchange rates if you're using you know, multi currency your preferences and settings. And then this is the, this is one of the unique things Intuit Payroll. Info backed up as journal entries. So keep that in mind, right? Like this is part of one of the wait a minute type of type of show stoppers when you're thinking of copying data is that even QuickBooks doesn't back up its own payroll service, right? So and if they as those native transactions, so paychecks to paychecks versus in this case, Payroll gets backed up as journal entry. So the financial impact and that's, I think that's the key takeaway for all of this is that a lot of these solutions are mere the main goal is that your financial impact of these, of these transactions should be paid off. Store, restored whatever, whatever way that you're, you're trying to, you know, copy data into one or the other, is that the financial impact of these things? So, but there is a business impact we're really kind of unpacking and talking about here as to whether or not this is the right course of action. Yeah. So any any thoughts on this this list here as you go to the next slide, which I think kind of talks with some of the stuff that doesn't, it also helps kind of answer a question that that was asked of what's been your experience with the backup and so forth. So, fundamentally, where I feel that these backup. All of the backup and restore services that we'll talk about, they most, they're going to, their focus is going to be on the financial data for filing your taxes. It's not necessarily going to be for the fancy artistic accounting you've designed for your custom reports, any like unique fields, tags, different things of those nature, that stuff won't necessarily pull over, but I think theoretically, the desire is that you'll be able to like. Have a, you know, a version of your book. So once you've reviewed it, everything's clear, you can still see historically what your true tax returns should have been filed off of sound, right? Yeah. Yeah. And that's and like just talking about and looking at this data that's not backed up and data that's not restored. I'm like, you go up here. The list data, what gets backed up? Budgets. But then you look at what's not restored budgets. Right? So. Yes. Great. I'm glad it gets backed up. But what good is it if I can't restore it? Which brings a point. So the one thing that I was surprised again, I love doing this stuff and starting to dive into research. Cause I always learn something myself, the cloud backups, especially like the Google drive, it creates a special dot CAB file, right. That will back up and go straight to your, to your Google drive. You can't restore it. Yeah. The heck are you supposed to like, so what are you supposed to like, why are you doing it? I don't know. Is there actually a way to do something with it? We had the author of the QBO for dummies. He's really good in Excel. Like he teaches classes about power query and those types of things. And he actually came up or use case for that is that when you when you do this cloud backup and download it as a local file and. In the slides, if I ever get the right slides up on the website, there is an appendix of of, of his workflow of how do you, how do you do that? And that's that's what it talks about here is the, is that he's, he's able to, because essentially you have a copy, a local copy of the, of the. The customer's file. What he does is he creates power queries in Excel and then uses that as kind of like a desktop version of, of the client's backup. Right? So that's, that is that's, that's definitely an advanced Excel. functionality of using it that way, but to your point, what good is a back, a local backup of Excel files, of CSVs, of all of this information, if I can't bring it into another, another subscription? So you know, there's a lot more devils in the details of what data is not backed up and what is not restored when it comes to copying, Data from in QuickBooks online advanced to or a copycat in this case of the gift on the screen. I didn't see this gift, everybody. I fricking love it. So it's awesome. Sorry. I love it. Yeah. Nice. So the data retention and the, it saves all the backup snapshots within that, within that last year, the backups that are older than that year won't be retrievable. But really who needs You know, more than a year's worth of active data. Anyway, if you're backing up gives you a historical, so just clarification, it gives you access to one year's worth of backup points, but that those backups will give you all it back of everything always. So from that moment in time, you know, when that backup was created and there's links there to the, to the QuickBooks articles so that you, you too can Be as confused as, as we are in the, in their documentation mismatch here, but the process of copying your data in QuickBooks Online Advanced, and there's an article in there as well, but yes, it's not as simple as Control C, Control V, and everything from the clipboard shows up in, in QuickBooks, but there's a source and then a destination subscription, you have to turn on the backup service in both, Run the backup and then wait, because typically that first, that first backup takes about four or so hours to run and you'll get a notification. You'll get an email saying, Hey, this backups been done, but then you turn on the backup feature in the. The new subscription, but then you turn off automatic backups, right? Because you don't want it to automatically back up nothing. And then when you choose to restore then it, it backs up nothing instead of, instead of the, what you wanted it to, but then you copy from your source to the destination, and then again. Wait, because that, that copying will take just as long as probably that backup to it. Now, the other thing is, once you get this done, you're going to want to open up both company files in different browsers, right? I know in 2025, you're supposed to be able to do both companies in the same different tabs kind of thing. We'll see that coming up, but you, you want to be able to run reports in both of them to validate the information, make sure the stuff still looks good. There's always going to be some little thing that you just didn't know. That they were using a certain function and you want to check that out. And Dan, as they're doing the poll you know, you've done more because we've talked about a couple of times where you've worked on them, where you've used this QBOA. And kind of one of the unofficial tips out there is if you've got a lower level version if you upgraded to advanced You could then do this copy over and you know if you really felt your client needed to downgrade again You could do so but you could upgrade to advance to do this whole process if necessary Yeah, like you can like if they're, they're on plus, for example, and then they go to advanced for the tech soup, right. The, the discount, you can upgrade them to advance, turn on the auto backup. You pay for a month or so of advanced to, to allow you to do this, this copying. And this is, you know, I'm, I'm more on the camp of, of, see what works. Right. You can always purge the data. In, in, in QuickBooks online, if it doesn't come over properly and, and that, I think that's more of. You know, coming from that Intuit mindset of trying to, trying to solve or provide an option but not necessarily knowing what you're in for, right? Without, without intimate knowledge of the apps that are connected or, you know, the other connected services that are, that are inside of that QuickBooks. And that, that I think is where a lot of that. Well, just start a new company mindset comes from, right? Because that will certainly, you know, oftentimes. Be the answer, right? In QuickBooks, in our QuickBooks desktop days, a lot of times things will get frozen and you have to suggest to restart the server, which when, when a company is open in the middle of the business day, that's not the easiest thing to do, right? There are, there are a lot of people accessing that server in the middle of the day, because that's why it exists to begin with. So restarting that server as it may solve your Short term problem with your QuickBooks desktop and multi user case Doesn't mean that that's the best thing to do at that moment in time. Yeah As kind of was brought up is when you're doing obviously if you're changing subscriptions any discounts you have you're you're gonna lose so There's an equation that you should be looking at when it comes to figuring out whether you should be doing all the stuff as we kind of mentioned before so so when you know the the third or the You know if advanced to advanced is not is not an option or that didn't turn out so well you know because you waited You know 10 hours for this to be restored only to find out that you didn't turn on sales tax in the destination Or you know some kind of setting that that didn't work, right? There are a plethora, or is it plethora? There's a lot of third party applications out there that that, that could potentially be the solution, but they if you, if this look, if this list looks familiar, it, there's a reason because there are QuickBooks online API limitations and knowing the history of, chrono books was an app, right? And it had to deal with its own limitations of accessing. You want to talk through some of these yeah. But when it comes to, so over the many last for many, many years now, I've become extremely familiar with the QuickBooks online API and. Most of the limitations when it comes to the apps out on the market, whether it's a rewind app, there's another one. We'll show you the Corona books issue. And, you know, ironically, some of the stuff, even QuickBooks online to QuickBooks, the line behind the scenes has to do with the code that they've written that you can access to be able to grab information and play with it. So the examples of that QuickBooks online payments. Something that doesn't transfer over right away, but that's, this is one where if you work with the support team, they can move your account over to the new company file. It's one of the few ones you can actually do something there, but it takes extra steps to do it. Payroll, you're toast. Nothing you can do there. If it's a built in payroll, you're going to end up creating a new one, which means now you need to start thinking about the timing of when you're doing this stuff. And maybe you're starting to copy a company file over with the plan of attack of starting at the beginning of a year or a quarter in a new company file. Because yes, that means new employee information, all those kind of details. There isn't a way to take a different payroll or an independent payroll and migrate. It into your QuickBooks online at this time. So it's one login and see you see everything other other things, bank rules, your reconciliations, other like the customer types, your price rules. You're seeing here, tags. We know those are going away. That's not available. additional custom fields. And then one of the other ones would be any advanced functionality. So if you've got advanced workflows, your memorized reporting, your recurring transactions automatically sent reports, all of that will have to be re created and you need to put that into your final phase of the whole project to put that stuff in. And somebody had asked, you know, what has your experience been with the QBOA backup? Has it worked? Did it work? I worked with with with a nonprofit who was moving, you know, because of the whole TechSoup issue, to say that it was done within an hour, no, it took several days and several attempts because there were, there were challenges, which is With the destination or the source or somewhere in between. And these third party apps are part of that, right? It's all of these online API limitations. They were subject to their own their own rules of engagement because it was, you know, coming from an app now into it, then. Now has the keys to the castle sometimes. So for these apps that they acquire, oftentimes they can give them special exceptions, you know, for for some of these things. And you'll see that with like things like spreadsheet think as opposed to, you know, other apps that that are able to send things to to Excel. So let's talk a little bit about some of those third party applications, Matt. Yeah, so Rewind has been the primary competitor for the longest time to what was once Chrono Books and you've noticed There's been a major drop off of talking about these type of backup specific softwares because there are these limitations and all of us accountants rightfully. So I've always kind of just said like, look, you're not actually able to copy all the data. So can you actually call it a true backup if you're not getting the full backup? It's only doing certain information. But the nice thing is if using the different backup softwares, this is a way with like both rewind app. I've used that many times. Syscloud, I researched, but I haven't used it. You can use this across any of the QuickBooks Online versions, up straight across either way. And the price is the same however you'd want to do it. They've got some great detail on their websites of showing you what will transfer, what won't. But all the limitation stuff we talked about before, it's still the same on everything on this page. Then the next option is if you want to use import export tools, I talk about a little bit more, I believe in the next slide. And there's quite a few different ones that are listed here. You know, Sassan's a popular one. Transaction Pro CDAT is my personal favorite. It's more expensive, and it goes much deeper into the API. But you really have to know how to use it, and you really have to have good Excel skills with almost all of these. Q2Q is phenomenal in the desktop aspect of this. I use it all the time. Zed Access is phenomenal for QBO. And they do zero so you can actually take stuff from a QBO and then move it over and so forth and such if you needed to as well. One thing I like about Zed Access is it's a desktop application that connects to QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks Online, right? So that gives you a you know, two for one. But and we'll, and we'll talk about the yeah, buts with, with some of these things. One thing that I found about that access is that the mappings so hard. What is this actually in, in QuickBooks and because it does talk to both, it has. Them all right. So even though you may see it looks like it could map to this. Well, no, that's only if it's in QuickBooks online or QuickBooks, point of sale, because it also connects to that as well. I've used every one of these and this is definitely like my bag, but we could do a whole session on just this part of it. So if there's people that are, have questions, feel free to reach out. And I could tell you some of the nuances between all of them, but respectful of time. We can't go into all that today. All right. So yeah, so I, I, I added that whole thing about the mapping. But talk a little bit about the, the import order. Yeah. So I, I, back in the day before we like newer, newer apps have come out, I used to do this all the time and you would take data from one. And the way you go to put it back in matters, and I want you to think about if you're, if you're really just trying to copy invoices over, well, you can't copy invoices over unless you have your customer information. You can't do it without your products and services. You can't do it without your terms, all your chart of accounts. So you really have to have certain information put in in it. Order and then to go deeper, if you've got your you know, when you're doing your products and services, you need your chart of accounts in ahead of time to know what to tag to different areas on purpose. So the order in which you go through all these pieces to push things in is very, very, very important. And then the next piece is with it which is still do with the order is the link to transactions. So again, this is a nerdy API thing, but. What is difficult with QuickBooks Online is when you try to reference an invoice or something, you don't actually reference the invoice number. You influence, you, you reference their ID number, which is the database number across it. So to link a payment that was there back, you actually have to know the pieces, which means You need really good excel skills. You can do it with Google, but I'm an excel person. Do some lookups to attach the pieces. Do, you know, if you're trying to do the same thing with attached documents, everything else, you're going to need some super skills to do this kind of stuff. Yeah. And check there's check the settings. Because I had, I had a horrible horrible experience trying to move. Through through a third party app where the referenced document, you know, like a bill to a bill payment, they, they were not, there was a company that did not use reference numbers. So they had tons of bills that did not have a reference number, and the tool was designed to look at the reference number as a unique identifier of, of the linkage. And what happened was, is because they had tons of bills not being numbered, the tool said, well, okay, well this is the reference number. It's nothing, it's blank, it's null. So I'll go back to the original bill that had, None in it and I'll append it so they ended up having one big bill that was dated the wrong date Years earlier that had all of their bill information were all of these payments that were that were supposedly paid A lot of a big very big, mess turn off your auto applies before you're doing any of that stuff is basically the key Functionality that turn all of it off because if you import the payment, it's just going to go And then you have to undo it all that's the official Blips, the creeps, the blips. Yeah. Yeah. All right, so in our last last few minutes here, we're going to talk about desktop, the round trip approach. Which is where you're going from QuickBooks Online to desktop. And then taking that desktop file to a new QuickBooks Online subscription. The advantage is that QuickBooks Online from going from desktop to QuickBooks Online is super simple, right? The process to actually do that, the challenge is all of these things. The things that don't come over like estimates, purchase orders, recurring transactions, locations don't exist in QuickBooks. Desktop. There is no such thing as a pay down credit card transaction or a sales tax payment is handled much differently in QuickBooks online as it does in desktop. So there is a lot of potential things for transactions not to come from online to desktop. But again, if That is the, you know, the most ideal circumstance that may not be. Out of the ordinary, right? So, if they're not using inventory any other things that you want to chat about here or make sure that we call attention to now. Yeah. So when I was creating this list, I specifically tried to focus on what does not move, but the link will get you back to a whole table of stuff and you can see it all there. Because. If you're going to be doing round tripping, this is the complicated part. You need to think about what, when you go from QBO to desktop and we'll go to another slide where it's got a link and shows a video I've created on how to do it, what will transfer what won't, and then going back the other direction, there's going to be things that don't go back the other way also. So you almost have to kind of like look at those lists and make sure that anything you're using or playing with is not going to be lost along the way. I've, you know, for multiple, multiple years, I've gone through and continue to test this export functionality capability. This still works to this day. I have people watching the video all the time. I'll put it in the link to it in the chat right now as well. Be sure to like and subscribe and it will help everything really really it'll help you get the process done but Round tripping and this was the top part of this because the subscriptions are changing on this If you don't have a current subscription for a desktop 2024 You won't be able to buy a new one necessarily, which means you're toast there So that means you're gonna have to have a license for 21 or 22 Which is one of the ones where you didn't have to have a subscription To be able to open it with that. Once you have that, then you can open it and a desktop and start to play with it. So again, I really want to stress, like, you need to think about why you're doing this. Companies call me all the time saying they want to do it. And I tell them desktops going away. Are you like, you're going to have to go back anyway. So why are you doing it if it's not truly a round trip? So just really think about it when you're doing it. Yeah, it really just depends. I mean, you want to make sure. From these things that, you know, that, that they're not being, they're not using a lot of these, or it's not a hardship to recreate these things. And you may have, you know, all of the above approach, right? Or maybe, maybe you use one of these tools or processes to get the majority or the lion's share of your data over. And then you use something like Sassant where you can Yeah. Be more surgical and extract the the, the estimates, for example or just to open invoices or the, you know, the, the, the things that you can't, that are, that are not part of the come along, come along for the ride, option, but, yes, it still works. And I think Miriam was, was asking a question. Or somebody had asked a question that you wanted to answer live and I meant to put to type it so I could put the link, but I put the link in the chat instead. And when they get the slides, I can have it that way because this actually, it's going to walk you through step by step by step, you can always pause it. It gives you the special, you have to go to a fancy URL to get to this thing to download the tool and and so forth. And then also, after you've done that, if you run into challenges, Reach out to me. i'm happy to try to help. I'll book a A call with you to you know, just try to assist and get you past a a hurdle if you needed to yeah and i've i've actually Talked to a couple people who've been trying to do this process of exporting from qbo to quickbooks desktop And it it always seems it's it's seeming to error as of late in repairing quickbooks, has actually corrected, corrected this so Repairing, going into the control panel of Windows and running the installation again and just choosing the repair option has, has Gotten further because it should just work right now and it just sometimes it doesn't so you also have to play with the browser So chrome i've seen where chrome stops working You have to use edge and i've also tried using firefox to get into it if sometimes so we're super close to time wise The things to consider there's some stuff here You guys can go back to and there's articles on it, but I want to go to the last slide if we can real quick this is some one more I believe one more Which so, you know, I know, I know you're not supposed to put a whole bunch of words on a slide because it's horrible, but the concept was to give the very raw basic ideas of how I would do this. And guys, there's so many like side tracks you could take off of this, but I wanted to try to help. It's the always clean everything up, run all your reports. Data storage is free on a computer. Run everything to Excel. It's easier. Start your export process. Get it open to desktop. Review it all. If there's anything you need to fix, fix all the stuff. Re reconcile your desktop. One, you know, just up to that date, the date, the amount. So it all matches for as many accounts as you can. Reveal all your list items to see if there's anything that's active or inactive that you want to get rid of. Might as well do a little bit of tweaky clean up if you need to, right? Get all that done. Have those reports ready. Start the process from desktop to back it back up to QuickBooks online, but right before I'm sorry, you back it up, run, verify data that should be quick and easy since it was just done, but just make sure there's no problems there. Then you start the migration process, open a new cubicle file. Once you're notified, run all the reports again. Check it against your, you can start by checking first against the other QBO. If it doesn't match great there, check against your desktop to see where you think broke and didn't turn out right. And then you're going to review all your company settings. Be nice, put their logo in, form their company details. Now you started looking at your bank feeds, your third party apps, your merchant processing. Double check here. After you do all that stuff, double check your reporting again, make sure all that stuff matches invite users. And I forgot step zero is charging to do all this first. Right. Or what you could do is is set them up as a standard user and not be the primary so that they can see it, but not necessarily walk off with with all that hard work that you've done. There's legal ramifications on that. I mean, I've never, I've always been able to get paid, but I tell you what, the stress and frustration of having to do that, it hurts every time. Yeah, it's it's always a challenge when that, when it comes to that. And then, because of all of these challenges that you will likely experience explaining that it's not my fault, right? Because there's a, there's a limitation to Everything here. There's no, there's no silver bullet that will just take a snapshot of your data. And move it over into a brand new subscription, like nothing happened, from before. It's not a crock that fits everybody, right? So like crock shoes that just one size fits everybody. And they're so comfortable. Exactly. All right. Well, we hope you appreciated or got, got something out of this. Actually, I do want to throw the last, oh, I've been sharing the wrong the poll for forever. So, whoops, hold on a second. What happened? Oh, did you, did you, did you launch that pool? No, you did, but I maybe closed it, so I never know if I'm closing it or not, so, Likely folks, you'll be able to go into CPE there, which is the most important part of it, but we'd like to get, we always want to do the final one, which is finding out whether you learned something from this or not. Yeah, so if you learned something new, just throw that in the chat or on the, you know, the, the the face tube or anything else let us know if, if this was worthwhile. We appreciate you joining us today and we'll see you in a couple of weeks where I think we'll we'll actually be doing some of the Intuit news and and some of the, the, the tougher questions that have been showing up in the, in the Facebook group. So stump the chump next time. Which one's the chump though? I'm the new guy, so. One of us is the stump and the other is the chump. To be determined who the chump is on that. Matthew, thank you for all your hard work of Putting all this stuff together today and appreciate you all joining us and we'll see you next time on the QB power hour. Have a great day.