Enter customer opening balances in QuickBooks Online

Learn how to enter customer opening balances in a new QuickBooks Online file.

Moving to QuickBooks Online requires certain steps that need to be completed before you can start using QuickBooks. One of these steps is importing data from customers to chart of accounts.

Preparing for conversion

It's recommended that you migrate data at the period end when your books or your clients' books are tidy and reconciled. It might be the year, quarter or month end. You need to ensure you have access to the following reports:

• Bank statements (reconciled)
• Credit Card statements (reconciled)
• Debtors & Creditors accounts (reconciled)
• VAT Returns (filed to date)
• Any other balance sheet items

Importing from excel or CSV data lists

• Customers, Suppliers, Chart of Accounts, and Product and Services can be imported via QuickBooks Online
• Data Import is limited to 1000 lines or 2mb, if you have any large files you will need to split them into smaller files
• Historical data is not imported using this method
• Opening balances need to be entered separately

Order of Import

Once the company settings have been set up, your next task will be to import the data. It's important that certain settings such as multi-currency & VAT are turned on before importing data, as these settings will have an impact on certain lists that are imported.

We recommend that you import in the following order:

1. Customers & Suppliers
2. Chart of Accounts
3. Products & Services

Entering opening balances for accounts in QuickBooks Online

When you create a new account in QuickBooks Online, you pick a day to start tracking all of your business transactions. You enter the balance of your real-life bank account for the day you pick so everything matches from the start.

To learn more about how to enter the correct opening balance, please see Enter opening balances for accounts in QuickBooks Online.