Conversion issues from Online back to Desktop...help?

Appreciate the complete details of your concern, @newolduser.

Allow me to furnish you with information on how QuickBooks Desktop handles your QuickBooks Online company file when undergoing the conversion process.

When exporting your QuickBooks Online information to QuickBooks Desktop, there are some information that will not be included. Reconcile reports, due to their special nature as a static report, are not exported.

For a more comprehensive list on the limitations of exporting process, you may check out this article: Export limitations - QuickBooks Online to QuickBooks Desktop.

To resolve your reconciliation concerns, you may visit this page: Reconcile an account for multiple months or years of transactions and financial statements.

Please don't hesitate to visit us here in the Community if you have other questions about converting your QuickBooks Online company file.  I'm always here to help.

Woah. That's unfortunate. And the reply from the QB rep is even more unfortunate.

If you were my client, what I would probably do is take the bank statement from 12/31/2017 and try to reconcile the bank account to that bank statement. Check the box that said "Hide all transactions after the statement date". Then select all the charges from the beginning of the account through 11/31/17. Then go through an individually select all the charges for the Dec 2017 statement. With any luck, you can reconcile it through that date. If worst comes to worst, enter your own transaction (check/deposit) to get the account to reconcile to the 12/31/17 statement. Its not ideal, but at the end of the day you can't spend months trying to re-reconcile the whole account and your taxes have already been filed for 2017. After you reconcile to the 12/17 statement, go through all 12 months of 2018 and reconcile those by month. I would say its more critical to get those reconciliations by month in QB since you may still need to file your 2018 taxes.

If you have already filed your 2018 taxes, you can try to method I mentioned above but use the 12/31/18 bank statement. Get the 2018 balance sheet from your accountant and enter a journal so that your balance sheet and P&L match their records.

Hi Lain,

Thank you for your detailed response! This is a bit overwhelming since I am a newer user - I'm going to print out your reply and break it down piece by piece so I understand. It's extremely frustrating since we asked the accountant if there would be issues about moving from QBO to Desktop, he said it was doable and no mention of issues. We new there would be some conversion issues and I read about them online but I haven't seen anyone mention having an issue like this!

I don't mind re-reconciling. I think the concern (for me) is that it goes back to 2004 - so I'm not sure exactly how reconciling to 12/31/17 will fix the issues before then...but I'm probably not fully understanding it so I'm going to read it over and try and understand it before I ask any more questions - I don't want to waste your time! Thank you!

So, the reason I suggested the 12/31/2017 banks statement is because of all the unreconciled deposits and charges going back to 2004. You have to get all those reconciled again and it would be too time consuming to try and reconcile every month since 2004. So, if you do one giant reconciliation from 2004 thru 12/31/17, that will get all those items reconciled so they don't keep showing up every time you go to reconcile a recent bank statement. In theory, since everything was reconciled, you should be able to reconcile 2004-2017 without much discrepancy. And, since your 2017 taxes are already filed, if you have to do an adjusting entry to get 2004-2017 reconcile just let your accountant know what happened and the adjusting entry you entered. With 2004-2017 transaction reconciled, you can move forward with 2018 monthly reconciliations and make sure those are correct as you prepare to file your 2018 taxes.

Can I piggyback off this question and ask a similar question?  It's kind of backwards from this question.  I received access to a QBO account and was asked to reconcile the year 2015 (and potentially I'll be able to work on 2016-2018 if I can finish 2015 timely).

I was told that the tax return was finished for 2014 and tied to the 2014 QBO and that now cleanup was necessary for the subsequent years.  So I began to reconcile 2015.  All of the transactions were entered for each year so it was only a matter of reconciling the bank account.   I was also told that there might be differences and to just put them to a suspense account for review.  When I reconciled January, the beginning balance was off, but I made an entry to the suspense account to move forward.  I finished January and then reconciled February and there were no other problems with either month.

But, when I began to reconcile March, there were not many transactions in the Reconcile screen so I looked in the bank register.  I saw that most of March through July transactions had "R" beside them.  At first I thought someone did that by mistake, but there were too many of them.

I then looked in the audit log and realized that the account had been converted from desktop during 2018.    So I assume many of the months had been reconciled in desktop, but all the past reconciliations are gone.  How do I undue those reconciliations?  I can't re-do the bank reconciliations when the transactions are not in the reconcile screen.

Do I have to go through the register line by line and remove the "Rs" so that I can reconcile? (there are over 300 transactions each month!)

OR, instead of re-doing all of the bank recs, should I continue with the reconciliation process in the first month without any "Rs"?  The months of August through December have no "Rs".

I copied the entire bank register for the year, which indicates which items have "Rs", so maybe continuing with the process in August would be the better idea.

This is an old post so I might not get an answer, but I hope you see it and are able to respond. 

Thank You!

Thanks for the detailed information about the process you've performed, dusty15. 

Yes, you're right, all transactions that have been reconciled in QuickBooks Desktop (QBDT) prior to converting it to QBO, will show as R on the register. 

We can proceed in reconciling the month of August to December since the prior months were already reconciled. To help you with the process of reconciliation in QBO, you can check out this article: Reconcile hub. 

I'll be around if you need more help. Have a good one!

PLEASE let me know how you resolved this.  We had quickbooks do the conversion for us after I made sure the books for 2019 were closed and to the accountant.  The conversion has been an absolute nightmare.  Quickbooks will not help me at all.  Now they have told me to speak with the accountant or a pro advisor to fix the errors.  The checking account reverted back to 2011 and is unreconciled and came over with  a zero beginning balance.  The employees info all had to be put in again.  Today I tried to post the payments made by credit cards and that goes way back.   I have used Quickbooks for 15 years and have always been happy.  This is such a bad experience.  We are still paying for both Enterprise and Online as I do not dare to cancel online yet. I am trying to get some sort of help and/or refund--not getting any response at  this point. HELP!

I'm joining this thread to share additional details about conversion, jadec38.

I understand the effect of converting data especially if you have a bigger company file.

There may be some changes when you convert your company data. There are some data that won't be converted since the QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop are two different versions and they also have different features. You can see in this article the limitations when you convert from QuickBooks Online to QuickBooks Desktop.

We can fix the incorrect beginning balance and unreconciled transactions by reconciling multiple months at the same time.

Once done, you can pull up the  Profit and Loss report for both QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop. This is to make sure that your books match after this process. You can see this report in the Reports tab in QuickBooks Online and Reports menu > Company & Financial in QuickBooks Desktop.

I'm just a post away if you need more help with this. Stay safe!