Switch from anywhere. Bring every transaction.
Not an opening balance. Not a summary. Your complete history — every posted entry, every year — brought across from whatever you use today and checked against that software's own numbers before Balanced Sum will trust it.
Before you start
Balanced Sum does not run payroll. If your current software runs it for you, migrating your books here will not bring it along and there is nothing in Balanced Sum to receive it. That's worth knowing now rather than halfway through — see the full list of what it doesn't do.
Stock is here, but it doesn't arrive in these two files. Balanced Sum tracks items, purchase orders, receiving, and builds — but a chart of accounts and a general ledger carry the dollars, not the parts list. Your history brings the value of your inventory across; your item list, quantities, and bills of materials are set up afterwards, once. When you enter your opening quantities, the value comes out of the inventory account your history already funded — not out of thin air — so the same stock is never counted twice.
How it works, whatever you're leaving
Three steps, all inside the setup wizard. Nothing posts until you tell it to, and nothing locks until it reconciles.
Export your chart of accounts and your general ledger
Two files out of the software you use now: the list of accounts, and the general ledger or journal covering the history you want to bring. CSV or Excel (.xlsx) — whichever your program offers. Include inactive accounts if it gives you the choice, so nothing gets skipped.
Each file needs to be under 25MB, so split a very long history into a file per year — which you want anyway, since each year posts and locks separately. If you upload a workbook, Balanced Sum reads the first sheet in it.
Sage BusinessWorks, Sage 50, Xero, Wave, FreshBooks, a bookkeeper's spreadsheet — if it can produce those two exports, it can come across.
Match up the columns — we guess, you confirm
Every program names its columns differently, so Balanced Sum reads your file's headers and proposes a match: which column is the date, which is the account, which holds the amount. It understands both common shapes — separate debit and credit columns, or a single amount column with negatives — and it handles the usual mess in exported numbers: dollar signs, parentheses for negatives, and thousands separators. You also tell it which date format your file uses, and every date in the column needs to be in that one format.
It ships starting guesses for Sage BusinessWorks, Sage 50 (Peachtree), Xero, Wave and FreshBooks, plus two plain-spreadsheet options for everything else. They really are guesses, and they are not all equally good: Xero's are the closest to verified, and Sage BusinessWorks' are the roughest — inferred from the product's report vocabulary rather than a real export — so expect to set most columns yourself there. Either way you see the first rows of your own file with the mapping applied, and you confirm or change every column before anything is read for real. Once it's right, you can save that column setup and reuse it for the next year's file.
Prove it reconciles before you trust it
Balanced Sum reads both files, groups every transaction by year, and tells you — in plain language, not error codes — about anything it can't place cleanly. Dates it can't read are listed with the row number they came from; accounts it doesn't recognize are listed by name; a transaction whose lines don't add up is listed by its transaction number. Nothing imports while anything is wrong.
On this general path, the fix for an unrecognized account is to correct your chart export and upload it again — there's no in-wizard rename-and-retry for it the way the QuickBooks path has. It's a re-upload, not a re-do: nothing was posted, so there's nothing to undo.
Then, oldest year first, you post that year and close it: you upload your old software's own Trial Balance as of that December 31st (as Excel .xlsx), and Balanced Sum compares its totals against it, account by account. Any difference is shown in dollars, right there. Not until every account matches exactly does the year lock — and once locked, nothing in it can be edited again, ever, by anyone.
Coming from QuickBooks Desktop? There's a faster way in
QuickBooks was the first program we migrated, so it gets its own path in the wizard — you point it at two specific QuickBooks reports and it already knows what every column means. No column matching, no guessing.
Export two reports from QuickBooks Desktop
Your accounts, then your full transaction history, in QuickBooks' own debit/credit form:
Check “Include inactive” so nothing gets skipped, then export it.
Set the date range to All, then export to CSV or Excel. Use the Journal report, not the General Ledger report — the Journal is already in the debit/credit form Balanced Sum reads.
The wizard validates every year and shows you plain-English results
It reads both files, groups every transaction by year, and tells you — in plain language, not error codes — about anything it can't place cleanly: an account it doesn't recognize, a line it can't map. You fix those in QuickBooks or resolve them in the wizard; nothing gets guessed at silently.
Posting is explicit
Once a year looks clean, you post it — a deliberate action, not something that happens automatically the moment a file uploads. You're always looking at what's about to be posted before it's posted.
Each year reconciles to QuickBooks' own trial balance before it locks
Oldest year first. For each one, you also upload QuickBooks' own trial balance as of that December 31st, and Balanced Sum compares its own totals against it, account by account. Any difference is shown, in dollars, right there — not until every account matches exactly does that year lock. Once locked, nothing in it can be edited again, ever, by anyone.
Set both the From and To dates to 12/31 of the year you're closing, then export to Excel (.xlsx).
One note on sales tax
Imported history carries no sales-tax detail — tax on migrated transactions was already collected and filed through QuickBooks, and the amounts land in your books correctly either way. Sales tax you charge from here on is tracked properly, on the invoice and in its own payable account.
Sage BusinessWorks, Xero, Wave, FreshBooks and others
Everything that isn't QuickBooks Desktop goes through the general path above — the same staging, the same validation, the same year-by-year reconcile. Pick your program in the wizard and it starts with a set of column guesses tuned for that product; pick "something else" and it starts from a plain spreadsheet, with debit and credit columns or a single amount column, whichever your export has.
The honest scope line
Balanced Sum can bring history across from any software that can export its general ledger to CSV or Excel. That's the real requirement — not a list of logos. The per-product starting guesses are a convenience that saves you a few clicks; the column matching step is what actually makes it work, and you drive that yourself for any program on earth.
What you get — and what you don't
Every posted transaction, drillable
Click an account on your profit & loss, balance sheet or trial balance and you get that account's transactions — including a 2019 one imported from your old software years later. Prior-year statements are reproducible exactly as they were, and every account has a register with a running balance you can scroll through.
No opening balance, no double-counting
This is a full history import, not a fresh start with a summary balance — so Balanced Sum never posts an opening-balance entry alongside it. Doing both would count everything twice.
Open invoices and bills, for aging reports only
After history is in, there's a dedicated flow — "Add older invoice (already in your books)", and the same for bills — that records a still-unpaid invoice or bill as a document with no accounting impact of its own. Your A/R and A/P balances are already correct from history; this exists purely so your aging reports work going forward. It's one at a time, typed in, not a bulk import.
You can't accidentally import a year twice
Balanced Sum fingerprints every file it reads. Upload the same export a second time — even renamed — and it's refused, with an explanation rather than a silently doubled year.
What doesn't come across
This is a books migration, not a full data migration, and we'd rather tell you that up front than have you discover it later. A 2019 invoice arrives as a balanced pair of journal lines, not a recreated invoice with line items and terms. Item-level sales history, job costing, and your customer and vendor lists stay in your old program. Your item list, on-hand quantities, and bills of materials don't come across either — a general ledger has no parts in it. You enter those once, afterwards, and the value they represent comes out of the inventory account your history already funded. There is also no reading of proprietary backup files — a QuickBooks .QBB, or any other program's own backup format, can only be opened by the software that wrote it. Exports are the road in.
Current scope
Migration is file-based: you export .csv or .xlsx files from your current software and hand them to Balanced Sum. There is no direct connection to your QuickBooks company file, your Sage data, or any online account, and nothing installs into the program you're leaving. Year-end trial balances used for the reconcile-and-lock step are read as .xlsx; if your software only exports CSV, open it in Excel and Save As .xlsx.