Quickbooks to D365 BC Migration

Both QuickBooks and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central are software solutions that provide accounting functionality for businesses. They each can provide the core functionality that is required to handle basic accounting in a small business. But beyond that, the two solutions are worlds apart.

Overall, QuickBooks tends to be more suitable for simple small businesses or micro-businesses, whereas Dynamics 365 Business Central fulfills the more complex needs of growing small businesses and mid-size businesses. In fact, many businesses start on QuickBooks and then transition to Business Central once their needs grow.

Challenges With Quickbooks

  • Maximum records limit reached – QuickBooks imposes limits on how many records the system can process and maintain in its archive, number of employees, posted transactions, etc.  Once you reach those limits, your only choice is to start removing the history from QuickBooks.
  • An insecure file structure exposes QuickBooks data to direct editing within the data tables themselves.  This allows for after the fact “editing” of posted transactions, with no record of the changes made.  It even allows for the creation of out-of-balance transactions (Credits do NOT equal Debits) in your data.

Dynamics 365 Business Central vs. QuickBooks

QuickBooks Weaknesses

  • Lacks depth of capabilities within purchasing, inventory, manufacturing distribution, audit control, advanced reporting. Adding capabilities and service offerings from QuickBooks’ partners is expensive.

Dynamics 365 Strengths

  • Dynamics 365 Business Central is a comprehensive solution with advanced capabilities that handle more complex business processes with secure workflows and improve compliance.
  • QuickBooks Pro and QuickBooks Enterprise are built on different platforms than QuickBook Online so upgrading is not seamless.
  • The shared codebase between Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics NAV ensures complete consistency and ease of transition for users between on-premise and cloud versions.
  • Minimal business productivity integration skews the solution to accountants, not business owners.
  • Deep integration with Office helps enhance productivity and usability for users.
  • Companies can quickly outgrow QuickBooks’ user and transaction limits, as well as its limited reporting capabilities.
  • Dynamics 365 Business Central is built on Microsoft Azure platform with the ability to scale to support growing transaction volumes and more users. Includes a web-based reporting portal with extensive reporting capabilities.

USING THE QUICKBOOKS DATA MIGRATION EXTENSION

This extension makes it easy to migrate customers, vendors, items, and accounts from QuickBooks to Business Central. If your business uses QuickBooks today, you can export the relevant information and then open an assisted setup guide to upload the data to Business Central.

Data from QuickBooks Desktop

You can import the following data from QuickBooks Online to Business Central:

  • Customers
  • Vendors
  • Items
  • Chart of Accounts
  • Beginning Balance transactions in General Ledger
  • On-hand Quantities for Inventory Items
  • Open documents for customers and vendors, such as invoices, credit memos and payments

We migrate only full amounts on sales and purchase documents. We do not update partially paid amounts. For example, if a customer has paid 300 of a total of 500 dollars on a sales invoice, we migrate the full 500. If you have received partial payments, you must update these manually, either before or after you migrate data. We recommend that you apply outstanding transactions before you migrate, just to make things easier afterward.

Prerequisites to Migration

An important part of the migration process is to specify the accounts to migrate transactions to. It’s a good idea to plan this mapping before you migrate data. For example, the accounts where you post transactions for:

  • The sale of items or services to customers
  • The purchase of items or services from vendors
  • Adjustments in the general ledger

Business Central requires that general ledger accounts have account numbers assigned to them. Make sure that account numbers are assigned to your accounts in QuickBooks. If transactions in QuickBooks have tax amounts, you must set up a tax account for your tax jurisdictions in Business Central before you can post transactions.

In order to get your data out of the QuickBooks desktop application you will need to download the Microsoft Data Exporter Tool. The instructions for the tool are in the Data Migration Wizard in Business Central. The tool will connect to your QuickBooks application and export the applicable data to a .zip file.

Post Migration Validation

After you migrate data, transactions have the status Unposted, so you can review them and make adjustments. To review the transactions, go to the page where you would normally find them. For example, to review unposted sales invoices, go to the Sales Invoices page. To review payment journals, go to the Payment Journals page. There are a few things in particular that you should do: If the transactions in QuickBooks had markup or discount amounts, you must manually add the amounts to the related transactions in Business Central before you post them. If you are using value added tax (VAT), you may need to add a business posting group and a product posting group to the posting setup so that you can post VAT amounts. Verify the beginning balances for accounts in the general ledger. QuickBooks does not store the current balance for all accounts, so you might need to correct beginning balances.

Ready to help your business grow, evolve and transform with Dynamics 365?