What doesn’t convert when you move from Desktop to Online

The migration tool does a decent job of what it does: it moves your transactions. The trouble is that people read "your data will be moved" as "everything will be there", and the gaps only surface weeks later when someone goes looking for a memorized transaction or a prior-year payroll figure.

Intuit publishes the limitations. They are just not what anyone reads before committing to a date. Here is the list, and — more usefully — what to do about each one before you move.

What cannot convert

Intuit's own documentation lists these as data types that cannot be converted:

• Budgets
• Memorized transactions (recurring entries)
• Invoice and other templates
• Sales orders
• Payroll records
• Projects
• Attachments
• Non-posting entries, including estimates

And these need setting up again by hand:

• Company settings — name, address, preferences
• Bank and credit card connections
• Custom templates
• Features that simply don't have an equivalent between the two products

Payroll is the big one

If you run payroll in Desktop, read this part twice, because it is the gap that causes the most trouble after the fact.

• Historical paychecks convert into standard checks. The money is there; the payroll structure is not.
• The payroll item breakdown does not transfer. Individual deductions, contributions, local tax withholdings and garnishments are gone.
• Prior-year year-to-date figures do not convert. Year-to-date payroll information has to be manually re-entered for each employee.

The practical consequence: after conversion you have checks that reduced your bank balance correctly, and no payroll detail behind them. Your wage expense is right in total. Your ability to reconcile a 941 to the file, or to explain a specific employee's withholding history, is not.

What to do about it: export everything payroll-related before you move. Payroll summaries by employee, by quarter, and year-to-date detail for the current year. Not because the migration will fail, but because that detail is unrecoverable afterwards and you will need it at year end.

Sales tax

Sales tax does not copy for all transactions. Given how much depends on that history — and what it takes to reconstruct a liability account — verify the sales tax position in the new file against the old one before you consider the migration finished.

What happens to reconciliations and balances

Transactions convert. Reconciliation history and opening balances frequently need attention afterwards, and differences that don't reconcile during conversion land in Opening Balance Equity — which is why a balance so often appears there immediately after a migration.

That balance isn't just an inconvenience. It is a summary of what didn't convert cleanly, and it is worth reading before you clear it.

Large files

Very large or complex files — extensive inventory, many years of transactions — can hit limits or convert only partially.

Find out whether yours is in that category before you pick a migration date. Discovering it mid-move turns a planned weekend into an open-ended problem.

A migration checklist worth actually following

Before:

1. Export payroll detail — by employee, by quarter, year-to-date.
2. Export or screenshot budgets.
3. List memorized transactions — what they are, amounts, schedules. You will rebuild these by hand.
4. Save custom templates as PDFs so you can recreate the layouts.
5. Export open estimates and sales orders.
6. Download attachments.
7. Run and save balance sheet, P&L and trial balance as at the conversion date. This is the single most valuable step, and the most commonly skipped.
8. Note the last reconciled date and balance for every account.

After:

1. Compare the new file's balance sheet and P&L to the reports you saved. They should agree. Where they don't, that difference is what to investigate — and step 7 is why you can.
2. Check Opening Balance Equity and identify what's in it.
3. Verify sales tax balances against the old file.
4. Re-enter payroll year-to-date figures per employee.
5. Rebuild memorized transactions and templates.
6. Reconnect bank feeds — carefully, so the first download doesn't duplicate transactions that already converted.
7. Do a test reconciliation against the last known-good statement before trusting the file.

That step 7 in the "before" list is the one that separates a migration you can verify from one you have to take on trust.

Should you migrate at all?

Worth asking honestly rather than assuming.

Migrate when the file's history has value — trends, lender questions, tax comparatives — and the file is in reasonable health. That is most businesses.

Consider a fresh start when the file is already badly broken. Converting a file that doesn't balance produces a new file that doesn't balance, plus conversion differences on top. But this is a decision to make on the file's actual condition, not on convenience — history is genuinely valuable and abandoning it creates its own problems, so it deserves a proper look rather than a shrug.

When this stops being a DIY job

Do it yourself when the file is small and healthy, you don't run payroll in Desktop, and you have few memorized transactions or custom templates.

Get help when:

• You run payroll in Desktop — the year-to-date re-entry is exacting and the consequences of getting it wrong land at year end.
• The file is large or inventory-heavy.
• The file doesn't currently reconcile, in which case fix it before moving it rather than after.
• You depend on many memorized transactions or custom templates.
• Sales tax history matters to you and must be verifiable in the new file.
• You need the migration to be verifiable — someone able to show the new file agrees with the old one, rather than assert it.

That is what a QuickBooks migration engagement covers: capturing what won't convert before the move, running it, and then reconciling the new file back to the old one so you know it is complete. Where the file needs work first, that is scoped as cleanup — because converting a broken file just relocates the problem.

TechBrot works remotely in your own QuickBooks file, which you continue to own and control throughout. We do the operational bookkeeping and hand your CPA a file they can file from; we don't file returns.