The hardest part of switching accounting software isn’t learning a new app. It’s the years of history you leave behind. Open invoices, unpaid bills, customer balances, last year’s numbers your accountant still needs: nobody wants to re-key all of that, and nobody wants to start again with an empty ledger either.
So we built a proper QuickBooks Online import. Connect your QuickBooks company, check what’s in it, and Fastbooks copies it across. When it’s done, it checks every balance against QuickBooks so you know nothing went missing on the way.
How it works
- Connect your company. In Fastbooks, go to Settings → Import → QuickBooks Online and sign in to Intuit. Pick the company you want to bring over. Fastbooks only reads from QuickBooks, so nothing in your QuickBooks account changes.
- See what’s there. Before anything is copied, Fastbooks counts what the company holds: accounts, customers, vendors, products, invoices, bills, payments, expenses, journal entries and more. You’ll also see the company’s currency, and a warning if your Fastbooks organisation would need to switch to it.
- Choose how to import. Add to these books keeps everything already in Fastbooks and adds the QuickBooks records alongside. Start fresh clears out your transactions, contacts and products first, then imports. You’ll be asked to type your organisation’s name to confirm. Your chart of accounts, tax rates, bank accounts and team stay put either way.
- Carry on working. The import runs in the background. We’ll email you when it’s finished, along with a summary of anything that needs a look.
Only owners and admins can run an import.
What comes over
Your chart of accounts, customers, vendors, products and services, tax codes and payment terms all come across, including inactive ones, so old transactions still point at the right place.
Then your transactions, mapped onto how Fastbooks works:
| In QuickBooks | In Fastbooks |
|---|---|
| Invoices | Invoices, with the payments made against them |
| Sales receipts | An invoice plus a payment for the full amount |
| Estimates | Quotes |
| Customer payments | Payments on each invoice they cover, including amounts settled with credits |
| Bills | Approved bills, with the QuickBooks number kept as the supplier’s reference |
| Bill payments | Payments on each bill they cover |
| Expenses, checks and card purchases | Expenses |
| Credit memos, refunds, vendor credits | Journal entries |
| Deposits, transfers, credit card payments | Journal entries |
| Journal entries | Journal entries |
| Sales tax, GST and VAT payments | Journal entries (in regions where QuickBooks records them) |
Because invoices, bills, payments and expenses are recreated as real documents rather than one big opening balance, they show up in their own lists and your reports work for past periods too. Your profit and loss for last year looks like last year, not like a single adjustment dated today.
A few details we sweated so you don’t have to:
- Document numbers are kept. Invoice 1042 in QuickBooks is invoice 1042 in Fastbooks, and new invoices carry on from where your numbering left off. If QuickBooks let two documents share a number, the second one gets a suffix and we tell you about it.
- Tax is translated, not flattened. Outside the US, each QuickBooks tax code becomes a Fastbooks tax rate. For US companies using automated sales tax, each distinct rate you’ve charged becomes its own rate (for example “Sales tax 8.25%”).
- Bundles are expanded into the products they contain, and voided transactions are recognised as voided.
- Foreign currency is preserved. If you use multicurrency, foreign-currency transactions keep their currency and amounts.
How we check it worked
Moving your books is only useful if you can trust the result. So at the end of every import, Fastbooks pulls the trial balance from QuickBooks and compares every asset and liability account with its balance in Fastbooks.
If everything matches, you’ll see that in the summary. If an account is off, you’ll see exactly which one, what QuickBooks says, what Fastbooks says and the difference, so you or your accountant can go straight to it. We also flag any document whose total came out slightly different, which is almost always tax rounded per line instead of per document.
What doesn’t come over
We’d rather be upfront about the gaps:
- Bank feed transactions. QuickBooks doesn’t share the raw lines from your bank feeds. Your bank and credit card accounts are created in Fastbooks, and you can upload bank statements to reconcile from here on.
- Purchase orders. Fastbooks doesn’t have purchase orders, and they don’t affect your books.
- Employees and time tracking. These aren’t imported. If you run payroll in Fastbooks, add your team under People.
- Exchange gains and losses on foreign-currency transactions aren’t recreated.
The import summary tells you how many of each were left behind, so nothing disappears silently.
The import works with QuickBooks Online. If you’re on QuickBooks Desktop, get in touch and we’ll help you find the best route over.
Importing again
You don’t have to switch overnight. Plenty of people run both for a month while they get comfortable. If you keep using QuickBooks for a while, just import again: Fastbooks adds only what’s new and leaves records you’ve already imported (and any changes you’ve made to them in Fastbooks) alone. If an import was interrupted part way, Start fresh gives you a clean run.
When you’re done, disconnect QuickBooks from the same screen. Fastbooks gives up its access, and everything already imported stays in your books.
Ready to switch?
If you’ve been weighing up the move, our Fastbooks vs QuickBooks comparison covers the differences feature by feature, and pricing is simple: the free plan includes unlimited invoices and bills, and Pro is $20 a month.
Create your Fastbooks account, head to Settings → Import, and bring your books with you.
QuickBooks is a trademark of Intuit Inc. Fastbooks is not affiliated with or endorsed by Intuit.
