Conversion options to migrate from Sage 50 to QuickBooks Online using Dataswitcher

It's important that there are no existing transactions in your QuickBooks Online file.  If you do have data in your company, you will need to purge your file to ensure there is no data before your conversion starts.

Before you begin, it's worth taking a backup. Please note this is not the backup you will be sending to Dataswitcher. We recommend you give the backup the name PRE_CONVERSION.001.

To create a new backup in Sage50, follow these steps:

1. Open Sage50 and login to your company.
2. Select File in the top left menu.
3. Choose Back Up, then follow the screens and make sure you select all type options.

There are some accounts you need to clean up prior to the conversion. This makes the post-conversion steps easier to check and ensures you do not get unneeded data in the new system

• Suspense Account: The suspense account is used by Sage50 when there is no way to determine where the transaction belongs. You will need to assign these transactions to the right accounts.
• Mispostings account: In some specific cases (e.g. a wrong refund) this account has a balance. If it still has a balance before the conversion, this has to be cleared up before continuing.

To ensure a successful conversion, match all your outstanding payments/sales on accounts to their respective invoices. If you do not match these they will be brought over as a journal entry to close the conversion. You will have to match them manually post-conversion.

When these journal entries are brought over, your historical A/P and A/R might not be correct. The converted balance of A/P and A/R will always be correct, however, some entries will appear in QuickBooks Online under the incorrect column. The same would apply for credit notes; apply these to the corresponding invoices to get a better quality conversion.

Sage50 works by using ranges for nominal codes. If a code appears out of range, Dataswitcher will be unable to determine the type of account whether it be a Profit & Loss account or Balance Sheet.

Please ensure that all nominal codes are inside the range of your chart of accounts.

Reconciling your bank accounts prior to conversion makes work a lot easier in QuickBooks Online. After reconciling, make a note of the balances on your bank accounts. We will need this later when preparing the post-conversion reconciliation in QuickBooks.

When you are using the VAT Cash Accounting scheme this is important as well. Otherwise, the next step will not contain accurate details (VAT reporting). If you do a full reconciliation before the start, the post-conversion step will be a lot easier (since you can just check all entries with one click). If you don't fully reconcile, you'll need to look through a lot of entries in QuickBooks Online to uncheck them.

Both processes are supported, but reconciliation before the conversion can save you some time.

Before following this step, please ensure you have followed step 1 (make a pre-conversion backup)

Sage50 data files might get corrupted over time. You will need to clean up the datafiles before we can send them to Dataswitcher for conversion. Follow these steps to clean up the data files:

1. Go to File and select Maintenance.
2. Open Recovery Tools and make a backup (this is not the backup for your conversion), this is an additional safety step. This is a required step.
3. Now select the following buttons in order:
   1. Recreate CIS History
   2. Recalculate Project History
   3. Recalculate Stock
   4. Recalculate Order Allocations
   5. Reset Bank Reconciliations
   6. Reset Transaction Status
   7. Recalculate Period Values
   8. Recalculate Transaction History
   9. Reindex and Compress All
4. Select Close.
5. Answer No to the data check.
6. Continue.

Rebuilding the data files

Rebuilding is required to fix some issues with password authentication in Sage50. Open the Rebuild dialog (Select File and then Maintenance if you closed the window).

To enable, select OK and uncheck Keep my Deletion log, then select OK to confirm that you want to rebuild the data files.

After the rebuild is complete, you need to compress data and compress all data files.

Once complete, your company will be in better standing shape. Create another backup and call it DS_CONVERSION.001 (this is the file that has your latest changes and is cleaned up).

Dataswitcher requires you to do your first VAT report based on the old data in Sage50.

To give an example of how this works: You are converting on April 14th and you need to post your VAT report every quarter to HMRC. This means you are converting in the middle of a VAT period.

You will need to do a VAT report for the period of April 1st until April 14th in Sage50.

To do this:

1. Select VAT in the left-hand menu in Sage50.
2. Choose VAT Return and follow the onscreen steps.
   1. Set the periods
   2. Print the report
   3. Store the VAT return

After your conversion is done, you need to check the results. This is why Dataswitcher extracts the following reports from Sage50:

• Profit and loss until conversion date
• Trial balance until conversion date
• Balances on your bank accounts
• Print a list of outstanding invoices of your customers and suppliers per conversion date

Once all the above tasks are done, send the backup (the file where you made the changes) through our wizard.

Remember to send Dataswitcher the right file (the file will be DS_CONVERSION.001 and not PRE_CONVERSION.001)

This way the backup is not larger than necessary.