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Beginning Balance Transfer Utility

Overview

Introduction:

The Beginning Balance Transfer Utility allows you to take the ending balances in one QuickBooks file (as of any date) and make them the beginning balances in a new QuickBooks file. This allows you to start a new file with the least number of transactions in it. The new file will normally be smaller than a file that has been condensed.

After transferring the beginning balances to a new file, you can transfer transactions from the beginning balance date to the current date using our Data Transfer Utility. 

IMPORTANT NOTE: This program  is designed only for businesses using the accrual basis of accounting. QuickBooks reports run on the cash basis that include any receipts or payments affecting beginning balances created by this program will be incorrect. 

The Beginning Balance Transfer Utility can transfer the trial balance, accounts receivable, accounts payable and inventory balances as of any date selected by the user. Uncleared bank transactions can also be transferred.

1. The Trial Balance is transferred by journal entries with the following changes:

            a. The Trial Balance amounts for Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable and Inventory are posted to the Opening Balance Equity account. Posting to the Opening Balance Equity Account avoids duplicating amounts when you transfer the detail for these accounts to the new file. The amounts posted to the Opening Balance Equity account (by the Trial Balance transfer) are offset to zero when you when you transfer the detail for these accounts (providing that the detail reports match the balance sheet).

             b. A new "Sales Tax Payable (BegBal)" account is created and the Trial Balance amount for the regular Sales Tax Payable account is posted to this new account. This new account is required because posting to the regular account would require a breakdown by Sales Tax vendor which is not available. The new account will zero out when the opening balance amount is paid to the sales tax vendor(s).

            c. Effective with version 8.04 (released 06/11/08) the program attempts to determine the detail in the undeposited funds account by searching Deposits made after the beginning balance date for Payments received before the beginning balance date. The  number of days searched is controlled by user preference. Payments found are listed individually in the undeposited funds account at the beginning balance date. Payments not found are included in the undeposited funds account as a lump sum.

 2. The Accounts Receivable transfer creates a new Invoice for each unpaid Invoice as of the transfer date selected by the user. These Invoices will have the same customer, invoice number, transaction and due dates as the original Invoices but will have only one item on them. This item is an opening balance item which points to the Opening Balance Equity account. 

 3. The Accounts Payable transfer creates a new Bill for each unpaid Bill as of the transfer date selected by the user. These Bills will have the same transaction and due dates as the original Bill but will be coded to the Opening Balance Equity account. The cash version of the program includes all of the original items on the transferred bills. In addition, each Item Receipt transaction in Accounts Payable is converted to a Bill. The conversion is needed because QuickBooks doesn’t provide the ability to transfer the Item Receipt transaction type.

 4. The Inventory transfer creates an Inventory Adjustment Transaction for each inventory item with an extended cost value as of the transfer date selected by the user. The Inventory Adjustment Transactions adds the quantity, value and average cost to the new company and credits the Opening Balance Equity account. 

For QuickBooks 2007 and prior, due to limitations in  the Intuit SDK, Assembly quantities in inventory can't be transferred and will need to added manually using an Inventory Adjustment transaction. Also inventory quantities imported for items using Units-Of-Measure will need to be manually adjusted to the stocking unit-of-measure quantity (only for non US versions of QuickBooks.).

5. Effective with version 6.08 and later, un-cleared checks and deposits at the beginning balance date can also be transferred to the new file. Click the "Reconciliations" menu at the top of the main screen of the program to transfer un-cleared checks and deposits. Un-cleared checks and deposits are not transferred by the regular transfer buttons on rows 6 and 7 of the program.

Preparation:  

If you haven't seen it, we have a summary page on how to create a new QuickBooks file at 

How to start a new QuickBooks file.

Before transferring any beginning balances, the new company file must have all of the needed lists (customers, vendors, items etc.) in it. You can include the lists in the new file two different ways as follows: 

Method 1. Use your existing file. To use this (recommended) procedure: (Most Canadian users must use method 2 below because the "remove all transactions" process has been removed from the Canadian QuickBooks.)

    a. Make a copy of your old QuickBooks file using Windows Explorer. Call this the "new" file

    aa. If you have Time transactions in the file, open the copy and click Edit>Preferences, Time Tracking preference and set the "Do You Track Time?" preference to "No". If you don't,  time transactions will not be removed in steps b or c below.

    b. For QuickBooks 2005 and prior, open the new file and click File>Archive and Condense Data and choose the "Remove ALL Transactions" option.

    c. For QuickBooks 2006 to 2011, open the new file and click File>Utilities>Clean Up Company Data and choose the  "Remove ALL Transactions".  

    cc. For QuickBooks 2012 and later, open the new file and click File>Utilities>Condense Data and choose the  "All Transactions" option. 

After the transactions have been  removed:

(1). Backup and restore the new company file. This purges the TLG file which grows significantly during the removal process
(2). Create a Portable Company File from the new company file and then Restore the Portable Company File. This compresses the QBW file and removes the space that was used by the transactions that were removed.

    d. If the file contains a closing date, remove it if it's later that the dates of the transactions you will be transferring.

    e. If the file contains any current year payroll transactions you will need to set your computer date ahead to a date in the next calendar year before you start QuickBooks and run the "remove all transactions" process. After running the "remove all transactions" process, exit QuickBooks and reset the computer date. 

    f. If you use online banking, you will need to edit the bank accounts and uncheck the Online Payment and Online Account Access boxes before running the "remove all transactions" process.

The "Remove ALL Transactions" option leaves you with a new file with all of the existing lists (customers, vendors etc.) in it but with no transactions (invoices, bills etc.) in it. In addition, the following data will still be in the file. 

After completing the "remove all transactions" process, transfer the beginning balances to the new file using this Beginning Balance Transfer Utility program. After using the Beginning Balance Transfer Utility Program, the Balance Sheets in the old and new files at the the beginning balance date, should agree exactly. If the old file contains transactions dated after the beginning balance data used with this Beginning Balance Transfer Utility program, transfer those with our Data Transfer Utility and Check Transfer Utility programs. For more on this see How to start a new QuickBooks file

If for some reason QuickBooks cannot run the "Remove ALL Transactions" option, you will need to use Method 2 below.

Click on the Videos link at the top of this page to see videos on some of the steps discussed above.

 Method 2. Create a new file. To use this method (use only if method 1 above cannot be used), click File>New Company and fill in the blanks as requested (you can skip the full interview). When asked to choose one of the canned charts of accounts, choose “No Type” and save the new file. When you follow this method 2 and create the new file from scratch, the new file initially created by QuickBooks will not contain the following information. See the following paragraphs for comments on how to handle this information.

Open the new file and 

    a. Edit Sales & Customer Preferences (or Payment Preferences in recent versions) and check the Company Preferences tab box labeled "Use Undeposited Funds as a default deposit to account" (QuickBooks 2007 and prior may not have this preference). 

Then open and close the Receive Payments screen.  This automatically creates the Undeposited Funds account with a special internal flag that identifies it as the real Undeposited Funds account. If you don't let QuickBooks setup the Undeposited Funds account, payments transferred will not show up the Banking>Make Deposits, Payments to be Deposited screen. 

    aa. Open and close the Create Invoices and Enter Bills screen so that QuickBooks will create the accounts receivable and accounts payable accounts.

    b. Set all the Preferences in the new file to match the Preferences in the old file. For example, if you collect sales taxes, turn on sales tax preferences. You will have to set up a sales tax item to complete this step. Also, if needed, turn on inventory tracking, units of measure, multicurrency etc.

    c. Using QuickBooks, transfer any custom templates from the old file to the new file. 

    d. If you use QuickBooks Assisted Payroll, contact them about adding payroll checks to your file. Do this before adding any transactions to the new file.

    dd. If you use QuickBooks Merchant Services, transfer this service to the new file. See Transfer Merchant Services

    e. Canadian 2008 non-multicurrency users must also 1. create a new Equity Account Named "Beginning Bal Equity" and  2. create a new Other Charge Item     named "OpeningBalance" which points to the new account  "Beginning Bal Equity". 

    f. In QuickBooks, click Company>Company Information and enter an email address if you will be importing any transactions marked "to be emailed. If you don't, QuickBooks will reject the transactions on transfer with a message that "the email address marked for this company is invalid".

    g. UK 2008 users should follow the additional procedures listed on the following page. Additional Procedures for creating a new UK QuickBooks 2008 file

    h. Canadian users see the following page for additional comments. Additional procedures for creating a new CA QuickBooks 2010 to 2012 files

    i. If you are using version 6 or prior of the Data Transfer Utility, set up custom fields in the new file. Version 7.08 and later of our Data Transfer Utility automatically transfers the custom field definitions from the old file to the new file.        

    j.  Use our Data Transfer Utility (DTU) software to transfer all lists (accounts, customers etc.) from the old file to the new file. For more information on the Data Transfer Utility, go to www.q2q.us . 

    k. After all list names have been transferred successfully to the new file, transfer the beginning balances to the new file using this Beginning Balance Transfer Utility program. After using the Beginning Balance Transfer Utility Program, the Balance Sheets in the old and new files at the the beginning balance date, should agree exactly. 

    kk. Use our Data Transfer Utility and Check Transfer Utility to transfer the transactions after the beginning balance date. Follow the sequencing recommendations in the "Transfer Strategies" document that is in the Help section of the Data Transfer Utility when using that program. (you don't need to transfer the list names again because they were transferred in j above.)

The steps below can be completed after you use the Beginning Balance Transfer Utility and the Data Transfer Utility but they will be needed to fully complete the new file setup.

    l. Setup users and passwords.  

    m. If you have employees, edit each employee and assign their earnings, taxes and deductions to them.

    n. Edit customers and complete their credit card number. QuickBooks only transfers the last 4 digits.

    o. Unfortunately QuickBooks does not provide any way to transfer multiple ship-to addresses. You can add these as needed or create an IIF file with a job for each ship-to address and import that file twice (once won't work). Then you can delete the un-necessary jobs but the ship-to's will still be associated with the customer. If you want to do this, send a request to support@q2q.us and we can send you a sample file.

    p. Use QuickBooks and transfer the memorized reports or recreate them if there is an error on transfer..

    q. Re-memorize the memorized transactions.

Additional Preparation Comments:

Before transferring beginning balances, compare the totals on the detail reports (as of the beginning balance date) for accounts receivable, accounts payable and inventory to the balance sheet amounts for these accounts. This program transfers the detail for these accounts and any differences between the totals on the detail reports and the balance sheet amounts in the old file will be left in the beginning bal equity account in the new file. You can journal these differences back to the balance sheet accounts in the new file,  if needed. If there is a difference between the total on the Inventory Valuation Summary report and the balance sheet amount for inventory, it may be due to items which have been marked as inactive. You can edit the items in QuickBooks and make them active to eliminate this problem.  

System Requirements:

1. Pro or higher version of QuickBooks Pro 2003 and later or Enterprise Solutions 3 and later..  

2. Microsoft Access 2000 to 2013 or the free Microsoft Access Runtime engine which can be downloaded from the "How to Buy" page.

3. Works with Win 2000, XP Vista, Win 7, Win 8.  

Contact:

If you have any questions or comments about this program, contact us at karl@q2q.us

Trademarks:

QuickBooks is a registered trademark and service mark of Intuit, Inc. in the United States and other countries. The Beginning Balance Transfer Utility is designed for use with the Pro and higher versions of QuickBooks 2003 and later and Enterprise Solutions 3 and later software only.