How to Convert your Quickbooks Desktop File to Quickbooks Online

How to Convert your Quickbooks Desktop File to Quickbooks Online

This is the new way. This is, we've been doing this for five years, join the cloud revolution. There's no reason to have all your QuickBooks information tied up in a single file when it can just be accessed online. QuickBooks Online is so much easier. So let me just tell you how to do this. I'm recording this video because we still get this request quite a bit when we're talking to new prospects. And so basically what you're going to do is you're going to, you log into QuickBooks Desktop and then make sure your file, like your whole QuickBooks Desktop is all up to date. Save that, save the file. A lot of people sometimes are doing this conversion when they don't actually have a QuickBooks Desktop program.

Like this happens to us quite a bit. Like someone will send us their file. And so for us we have to actually download a trial version of QuickBooks Desktop. So you can just Google QuickBooks Desktop trial version, Intuit has some really good help links on this by the way. Download that trial piece of software, they will actually let you start or convert one account without having to pay for QuickBooks Desktop. So they're very nice about this. They want to incentivize you to get on QuickBooks Online as well.

I think Kruze, on our website, you can click and we have a discount link you can just click through and I forget what the discount is, it's like 30% or something like that. Feel free to do that. And then you are going to, once you have your QuickBooks Online account set up, you are going to go back to QuickBooks Desktop and there is, in the file menu there is an export option you can do. You are going to click that and then it's going to run you through a series of prompts and ask you what the destination is and where in QuickBooks Online you want to convert it. It's all super easy. It's going to be like, it's easier than easy. It shouldn't take you like two minutes to do this, but it's going to be very obvious when you log in to the QuickBooks Online account, what the destination, what it's called. You're going to click "convert". You're going to give it, you're basically going to do that and then you're going to give it like 10 minutes. It's going to think, it's going to convert over. You'll get a message that says something like: we'll send you an email when your account has been converted over.

And then you are going to go over to QuickBooks Online and refresh or maybe log out and sign in again. And make sure all your data is there. So you're going to want to kind of do a side-by-side comparison to make sure your income statement and your balance sheet, the general ledger, all match what is inside QuickBooks Desktop. I wouldn't recommend like a super thorough craziness, go through every line item. You're going to be able to tell if things are in there by what the balance sheet income statement look like, the general ledger. If everything matches, everything balances, everything's reconciled still, you should be fine. And then you will go over to "manage my users" with the, there's a little gear icon in the upper right.

And you are going to manage your users and invite your friendly CPA firm, Kruze Consulting, to your accounts. Very, very easy. You do it as an accountant user. This, people don't know this necessarily, but being an account user gives you some superpowers. We can see all of the clients that we work with in one, you know, one giant console, and we can provision permission for each member of our team through that accountant console. So super important to give your accountant access as an accountant, not just as a normal user, because that'll make it kind of difficult for them, especially if you're doing this to get a quote.

Like the context of this for us, a lot of times, if someone has been maybe working with like an old school accountant who only knows desktop, or maybe they have been doing it themselves, and they're looking to professionalize their bookkeeping and taxes. And so this whole kind of jump through these hoops is all to get it into a QuickBooks Online version, where we can easily deliver a quote and tell you what's going on in your book. So I hope this helps, again Intuit does have some really good resources, including some videos on this. So I'm not going to really do like a play by play, insert a play by play video here. But this commentary should be very helpful for you.