hey it's patti scharf CPA and co-founder of catching clouds the leader in
e-commerce accounting today we're going to talk about xero conversions and
specifically this is this video was inspired by my buddy Brian who has asked
me a couple of times how do we decide when we're going to convert a file from
quickbooks online to xero or when we're just going to start over from scratch so
that's what this video is going to be about i want you to stick around to the
end because i have my favorite trick of all time
I was literally high-fiving myself at my desk when I like figured this out I like
ran downstairs and I was like Scott I have I just figured out this super cool
trick and he was like wow that's real exciting Patti but but it's really cool
any any accountants who are watching this are gonna be really excited so all
right so let's get started alright so way back in the day I started out using
the free conversion that Xero offers converting from QuickBooks desktop 2-0
and honestly it worked pretty well there are a lot of hoops you have to jump
through and make sure that this T is cross and that I is dotted but it did
work really well the one thing that I did not like about it is there was
something funky about the customer and the vendor information how that was
pulled in so like when you looked at like your checking account after you had
converted the file if there was a payment on any of the invoices whether
it was a sales invoice or purchases invoice it wouldn't tell you exactly who
it was that the invoice payment was paid to or from which was really kind of
annoying it it the accounting was alright but I just I didn't like that it
just really bugged me it wasn't as clean as I would have hoped it would be so
after a couple of years of that we moved on to trying this service called MMC
convert now I am this is not a paid advertisement I but I do love these guys
they they do really quality work I've never heard anything bad about them from
any of the other accountants that I know who have used them they they do a really
quick job it'll take 3 or four days to convert the whole file but
it's really quality work I've never had any problems with them they still have a
list of things that you want to make sure you do to make sure that everything
runs smoothly but but it's really a great experience then somewhere in
around 2016 I just kind of realized that everybody's books were they were a train
wreck and it was so much harder to go through and clean up their mess than it
was just to start over from scratch because one of the best things about
Xero is that it makes data manipulation really quick and easy so we we just
stopped using the conversion process altogether we just start over from
scratch and we we let the clients decide how far back in time they want to go if
they really do want all that historical information which most times they don't
we will we'll go ahead and convert the file through MMC convert but otherwise
we'll just pick a new date and time to start and just clean it up going forward
now here is where my badass trick this is the bad asius trick of all time okay
so and I'm going to show you how to do it what we're gonna do and and the
reason why we do this is because when you pull in all the information from the
bank and the credit card in the loan you have all of the transactions but
sometimes there's details in QuickBooks Online that you want to keep or in
QuickBooks desktop or wherever there's there's information that you want to
keep it's good quality information people have done memos or there's like
contexts and stuff that you don't want to lose and so that's what we're trying
to do is we're trying to retain all that information in this new file so we're
gonna go log in to a QuickBooks file actually a quickbooks online file and
we're gonna go down to a credit card so this is going to be the information that
you want to now live in Xero okay you make sure that you have the date range
of the information that you want and you'll see that it has all the different
vendor names it has all of the amounts it has all the coding and everything if
there was any if there were any descriptions and things like that
it would live in here too then you just go up to the top and you export this to
excel it is going to download an excel file for you that has all the
information in it that you need okay so I'm gonna make all the data look exactly
the way I want it to look please go check out this video here the top 5
coolest tips in using Xero look for tip number one that's going to show you how
to automatically import reconciled transactions into Xero and that's going
to show you exactly what I'm doing here and then I'll meet you over in Xero ok
now I have the whole file the way I want it I've added an account code a tax code
I actually changed the signs on these so it would import properly and I'm going
to import that into Xero so we're going to go over here to this account we're
going to manually import this statement so again these are the transactions that
came from QuickBooks Online I'm going to assign it ok so all of these have been
assigned and we're going to go ahead and import it you'll notice that 120 were
imported no duplicates everything was directly reconciled ok so now that all
these transactions are in here you're like yay ok but wait there all
reconciled so how how does this get me closer to where I want to be so here's
the thing it could be that the file that we were using before is complete garbage
and there could be duplicates in here there could be missing transactions so
we need to actually reconcile this against the bank now the problem we have
is that all these transactions are showing up as reconciled this is where
the badassery comes in ok so we go over to the bank statements and we're going
to actually select all of these transactions actually let's
get all of them so we're gonna select all these transactions and we are going
to delete the bank statement lines now do not panic this is okay it'll be fine
watch what happens we're going to delete all of these transactions but we're only
deleting the bank statement parts the account transactions themselves if you
look in here are still in here see they're just showing up as
unreconciled so all of those notes all the amounts all the payees all that
other information is in here so now all we do is we connect it to the actual
bank account pull in the bank feed and then we reconcile against them so let me
show you what that looks like okay so I've imported the bank statement
information so this came actually from the bank where as the other transactions
came from QuickBooks Online and you'll see they all match up so if you see lots
of green here it means that the prior accounts did a really good job and we're
going to go through and just kind of make sure that this is all cool okay so
I'm going through okay okay okay and look there was an extra transaction here
that wasn't recorded in the books so this is telling you that the books that
you had before it weren't quite cool either that or the credit card has a
mistake but it's more likely that the books aren't right so we can include
that and then I'm gonna keep reconciling okay so now we've reconciled everything
but look there's a discrepancy so if you go to the reconciliation report it'll
show you that oh there was one other transaction on here that did not come
through the bank so this was not recorded properly it'll show up as
unreconciled and when you go to match it against the bank and you look at the
actual physical bank statement you'll see that this probably doesn't belong
here so you just remove and redo that
boom all the transactions that were previously in QuickBooks Online are now
in here and it really did not take very long at all and it came in really
cleanly and it's going to all the accounts that you are telling it to go
to so this can save you all kinds of time and all kinds of brain damage and
it works really slick so I hope you like this video if you did please like
comment share if you haven't already please subscribe and I'll catch you
later