There are many and varied versions of Quickbooks so these are guidelines only. A full and very detailed guide to migrating from Quickbooks to MoneyWorks is available on request. It may be worth reading the first section of this document which explains how to tidy up your Quickbooks file before migration.
Provided you can export data from Quickbooks you can import it into MoneyWorks, although you may need to pass it through something like Excel to remove any extraneous data. You should find an Export or Excel button in some versions of Quickbooks in Items list at the bottom, and in the Customer Centre the Excel button at the top.
Exporting from QuickBooks
To export a QuickBooks report to Excel, click the Excel button at the top of the report, then choose Create New Worksheet. If you choose Create a comma separated values (.csv) file in the Send Report to Excel, Quickbooks will make a much cleaner text file (devoid of the formatting) direct to your hard drive. You can then open it in Excel (or a text editor) to view its layout.
If you do not have the Excel button you can usually use the Quickbooks export facility to export Customers, Suppliers, Products and the Chart of accounts into tab-delimited txt files or an IFF file (use File>Utilities>Export>Lists to IIF Files…). If using IIF files, you need to remove a number of rows of gibberish code (used to communicate with other Intuit apps), so that you are left with just the columns of actual data, which you can then save as tab-delimited. The gibberish IFF tags are at both the beginning and the end of the file. You can open the .iif file in Excel by right-clicking on it and choosing Open in Excel.
Transferring the Chart of Accounts
If you want to import your old chart of accounts, you will need to massage the one exported from Quickbooks into the correct columns (use a spreadsheet for this). Note however that in general QuickBooks doesn’t use account codes, so you will need to add a column for these. The information required is at Importing your Chart of Accounts. However you may want to set up again to take advantage of some of the more sophisticated features of the MoneyWorks account structure.
Transferring your Contact Information
To export your contact details, it is probably easiest to use Customer Contact List report (under Reports>Customers & Receivables). Use the Modify Report or Customize Report button to add the additional information that you need (in the Display tab), then send the report to Excel. You will need to repeat this for your suppliers (vendors).
To manually import the contacts, use the MoneyWorks File>Import>Names command (or copy and paste the block of text from Excel into the MoneyWorks Names list). You will need set the File Format to Merge file, and manually align the MoneyWorks fields to those in the CSV file. Note that you should set the MoneyWorks customerType field to 2 for your debtors, and the supplierType field to 2 for your creditors. Set the Code field to work-it-out and MoneyWorks will automatically assign a unique code for each customer/supplier as QuickBooks does not seem to have a unique name code.
Transferring AP/AR Balances
To import your opening AR/AP balances, you should be able to use the MoneyWorks AR/AP import script. Save the A/R Aging Summary and the A/P Aging Summary reports from Quickbooks as text files, then run the script. Make sure the reports are “collapsed”, so they just show the totals for each customer (and not the outstanding invoices).
Items and Inventory
To import your items, use the MoneyWorks file>Import>Items command. Again set the File Format to Merge file, and manually align the MoneyWorks fields to those in the tab delimited (or CSV) file.
Alternatively (and easier) run the Inventory valuation summary report from QuickBooks, and use the MoneyWorks stock Import Script. This enables you to easily import the basic stock information (codes, descriptions, prices), and also the inventory count and valuation.