Sage 50 to QuickBooks Online conversion: what it leaves out

What does the free conversion move, and what does it leave out?

From Intuit’s help page (updated August 5, 2026):

Moves	Left out
Up to 2 fiscal years of transactions	Older years (“You can add more for a fee”)
Opening balances, customers, vendors and chart of accounts	Bank reconciliation history
Invoices, credits and matched payments	Fixed assets
Journal entries	Employee year-to-date pay and payroll setup (pay rates, sick pay, vacation, direct deposit, withholdings)
Sales tax, as line items	Customer default sales tax codes
Up to 1,000 inventory items	Budgets, memorized transactions, templates and attachments
	Estimates, sales orders, work tickets, projects, and closed or partly closed purchase orders

What changes shape:

• Older years are “consolidated into an automatically calculated opening balance.”
• Jobs become classes, at extra cost.
• Departments become locations, one per transaction (line 1’s).
• Several AR, AP or sales tax accounts are merged.
• Paychecks and vendor cash or check refunds arrive as journal entries, the refunds with no link to the vendor.
• Manual AR and AP journal entries land in suspense customer and vendor accounts.
• Inventory past 1,000 items is added by hand or import afterward.
• The audit trail stays behind; keep your Sage 50 backup for audits.

What stops the conversion from finishing?

• Cash-basis books. Only accrual books convert, and switching methods won’t work.
• An older or non-US file. The wizard needs the US edition of Sage 50, 2016 or later.
• Long account numbers. “QuickBooks Online does not support account numbers with 8 or more characters.” Many linked account IDs can also make it fail.
• A QuickBooks Online company already in use. It needs a paid subscription, no transactions, sales tax turned off and no bank accounts connected.
• Working in QuickBooks Online during the move. “During this time, do not use QuickBooks Online. Doing so could interrupt the conversion process.”
• The wrong sign-ins. You need Full Access in Sage 50 and Admin in QuickBooks Online.

Processing averages up to 72 hours. Intuit advises against converting midway through a tax period.

How do you keep what the conversion drops?

In Sage 50, before you upload:

1. Clean the file. Run Help > Support Utilities > Integrity Check and fix what it finds. Reconcile every bank and sales tax account, and confirm aged receivables and payables match the general ledger on the conversion date.

2. Shorten account numbers of 8 or more characters.

3. Save the reconciliations. From Reports & Forms, open the Account Reconciliation report area. Run the Current Account Reconciliation report for each bank and credit card account and each open period (you can pick any of 24). The plain Account Reconciliation report shows only your last one.

4. Save the comparison reports. Print the Balance Sheet, bank balances, Aged Receivables, Aged Payables, Trial Balance, Income Statement and, if you collect sales tax, Taxable/Exempt Sales. Turn off “show foreign currencies” on the Trial Balance.

5. Export the older years. Print the General Ledger and Trial Balance for each year beyond the two. For Excel copies, go to File > Select Import/Export, pick the area and template, select Export, tick Include Headings on the Options tab, and select OK. Sage saves a .CSV file.

6. Save the payroll records. Print the Quarterly Earnings and Yearly Earnings reports, plus each employee’s pay rates, deductions and direct deposit details.

7. Save the fixed asset register. Keep each asset’s cost, start date, method, useful life and accumulated depreciation at the conversion date, or get the schedule from your accountant.

8. List what you’ll rebuild: budgets, memorized transactions, templates, open quotes and partly received purchase orders.

9. Back up twice. Go to File > Back Up, select Back Up, enter a file name, select Save, then OK. Name the first PRE_CONVERSION and the one you upload DS_CONVERSION.001, as Intuit suggests. Keep both off the Sage computer.

Then rebuild in QuickBooks Online:

• Fixed assets on Advanced: go to All apps > Accounting > Fixed assets and enter each asset with its accumulated depreciation, matching your books. “QuickBooks doesn’t record any historical journal entries.”
• Fixed assets on Simple Start, Essentials or Plus: these plans don’t depreciate automatically, so record depreciation with journal entries, at year end with your accountant.
• Payroll: go to All apps > Payroll > Overview, and next to Add your payroll history select Start. Enter year-to-date amounts from Sage pay stubs or payroll reports. “You can make changes to your pay history if you haven’t created any paychecks,” so finish before your first payroll.
• Older years as monthly totals: bring them in with a journal entry import, checked first with the journal entry import checker.

How do you check that the conversion worked?

Dataswitcher emails “Your conversion is ready to review.” After 72 hours, approval is assumed.

1. Compare the reports. “Sage 50 reports on periods while QuickBooks Online reports on specific dates,” so run each QuickBooks Online report on Sage’s period-end dates.

QuickBooks Online report	Sage 50 report
Balance Sheet	Balance Sheet
Trial Balance	Trial Balance
Accounts Receivable Aging Summary	Aged Receivables
Accounts Payable Aging Summary	Aged Payables
Profit and Loss	Income Statement

2. Mark the old transactions reconciled, before connecting any bank. Your new file “has no knowledge of that reconciliation.” Start a bank reconciliation in QuickBooks Online, then:

1. Next to Deposit (USD), select the blank check box.
2. Select Yes, select all.
3. Next to Save for later, open the dropdown and select Finish Now.

Repeat for each bank and credit card account, then connect bank feeds.

3. Link vendor journal entries to bills. Open each vendor. If the open amount doesn’t equal the overdue amount, select New check, then Add all, then Save and close. The amount paid should be 0.00.

4. Check sales tax. Turn it on and compare the Sales Tax Liability Report with Sage’s Taxable/Exempt Sales.

5. Look in the leftover accounts. Check the suspense customers and vendors, and the open equity account where Dataswitcher sends amounts it can’t place. The QuickBooks Online cleanup checker reads a Trial Balance export and shows what’s sitting there.

If something won’t tie out, Intuit says to contact QuickBooks Online support.

What are your options?

Option	Good for	Watch for
Intuit’s free wizard, two years	Clean accrual books	The “Left out” column
The wizard plus extra years or jobs	Older history or job detail	Both cost extra
Lists and opening balances only, history kept in Sage	Messy files, or a year-end switch	Old detail lives only in Sage
Your accountant or bookkeeper	Fixed assets, equity, payroll history	Who checks reports inside 72 hours
Bring in an outside team (Cleanups & bulk changes)	Large files, many years, cleanup first	Access to both systems and whoever knows the books

Moving from Sage 100 raises different questions, covered in moving from Sage 100 to QuickBooks.