Moving from QuickBooks Online to Net Net Books

1 10 minutes · do this before anything else

Check the fit

QuickBooks Online is a full double-entry accounting system. Net Net Books is a cash-basis bookkeeping tool. Most sole proprietors, freelancers, and small service businesses who already report on a cash basis lose nothing in the move. If you carry inventory, run payroll in-app, or file on an accrual basis, some of your workflow won't survive the trip.

In QuickBooks Online	In Net Net Books
Bank & credit card accounts	Accounts — checking, savings, cash, credit card, or other, each with an opening balance and a running balance.
Income & expense accounts	Categories — each one is income or expense, and can nest under a parent.
Transactions	Transactions — date, amount, description, payee, category, notes. Positive is money in, negative is money out.
Customers & vendors	The free-text payee field on a transaction. There are no separate customer or vendor records.
Bank reconciliation	The Reconcile screen — imported bank lines are auto-matched against your books.
Profit & Loss, cash flow	Cash-basis P&L and cash flow over any date range, exportable to CSV.
Invoices & bills (A/R, A/P)	Not tracked. Only the payment is recorded, on the day the cash actually moves. Keep invoicing wherever you do it today.
Balance sheet, journal entries, depreciation	Not available. There is no general ledger and no double entry — only cash movement.
Payroll, inventory, sales tax, 1099s	Not available. Payroll runs and tax payments come in as ordinary expense transactions.
Classes, locations, projects, tags	Not available. Use categories, or a separate business, to keep things apart.
Bank feeds & receipt attachments	Not available. You upload statements yourself, and files are discarded once parsed.

Talk to your accountant first

If QuickBooks has been reporting on an accrual basis and you move to cash-basis books, your reported income for the year will change. That is a tax question, not a software question. Net Net Books is a tool, not an accountant — confirm the change with a qualified professional before you rely on it for a filing.

2 5 minutes

Pick a cutover date

Your cutover date is the first day Net Net Books becomes the book of record. Pick the first day of a month — ideally the start of a tax year or quarter, so no reporting period is split across two systems. Then choose how much history to bring with you.

Option A — Clean start (recommended)

Set each account's opening balance to its balance on the cutover date, and import only transactions from that date forward. Prior years stay in the QuickBooks reports you exported in Step 3, which is all you need for an archive. This is faster, cheaper, and produces tidier books.

Option B — Full backfill

Import every prior period too, one month or quarter at a time, oldest first. Set each account's opening balance to its balance at the very beginning of that history — often $0.00 if you're going back to when the account was opened. Expect this to take an evening for a year of history, and to run into the monthly AI import budget if you're on the free plan (see Step 7).

Tip

Most people who backfill only really want the current tax year. Bringing over five years of statements rarely earns its keep — your exported QuickBooks reports are already a valid record of those years.

3 20 minutes · do this while your subscription is still active

Export your data from QuickBooks

Get everything out before you cancel anything. Once a subscription lapses, getting data back out is somebody else's policy, not yours. QuickBooks moves its menus around from time to time, so treat these as landmarks rather than exact clicks — every one of them is reachable from the Reports tab by searching the report name.

Export these four things

Chart of accounts. Reports → search “Account List”, or Settings ⚙ → Chart of accounts → the export icon above the list. This becomes your category list in Step 6.
Transaction List by Date. Reports → search “Transaction List by Date” → Customize → set your date range and set the accounting method to Cash → Run report → Export ▾ → Export to Excel. Run it once per month or per quarter rather than one giant file. This is what you'll actually import.
Balance Sheet as of the day before your cutover date. This gives you the exact bank and credit card balances you'll enter as opening balances in Step 5.
Profit and Loss for the periods you're bringing over, with the accounting method set to Cash. You'll compare against this in Step 9.

Worth grabbing while you're there: the General Ledger, your customer and vendor lists, and any prior-year P&Ls. Save them somewhere durable and backed up. If your plan offers a bulk export under Settings ⚙ → Tools → Export data, run that too — it costs you nothing.

The best import source is often your bank, not QuickBooks

Net Net Books reads bank and credit card statements directly. If you can download PDF or CSV statements from your bank for the period you're importing, use those instead — they are the original record, they carry clean descriptions and signs, and they'll reconcile perfectly. Use the QuickBooks export when your bank won't give you the history, or when you want to carry your existing categorizations across.

4 2 minutes

Create your Net Net Books account

Sign up with your email and confirm the address.
A business is created for you automatically, named after your email. Rename it from the business dropdown in the top-right → Rename…
Running more than one business? Use + New business in that same dropdown. Each business has its own accounts, categories, transactions, and reports, and nothing is ever shared between them.

5 10 minutes

Set up accounts & opening balances

Go to Accounts → New account and create one account for each real-world place your business money sits: every business checking and savings account, every business credit card, and petty cash if you track it.

Name — something you'll recognize on a statement, like “Chase Business Checking ••1234”.
Type — checking, savings, cash, credit card, or other.
Opening balance — the account's balance on your cutover date, from the Balance Sheet you exported in Step 3. For a credit card, enter what you owe as a negative number (owing $1,240.00 is -1240.00).

An account's running balance is simply its opening balance plus every transaction recorded against it, so getting these right on day one is what makes the rest of your numbers line up.

Business accounts only

Don't add personal accounts. If you pay for something business-related from a personal card, record it as a transaction on a business account only when the business actually reimburses you — that's the day the cash moves, and cash-basis books follow the cash.

6 15 minutes

Rebuild your chart of accounts as categories

Open the Account List you exported and go to Categories → New category. For each one, set a name, pick Income or Expense, and optionally choose a parent category to nest it under.

Three rules make this go quickly:

Skip everything that isn't income or expense. Bank accounts, credit cards, fixed assets, loans, and equity accounts from your QuickBooks chart have no equivalent here — accounts and categories are separate things in Net Net Books.
Consolidate ruthlessly. If QuickBooks gave you 60 accounts and you use 15, create the 15. A P&L with 15 meaningful lines is more useful than one with 60 mostly-empty ones, and you can always split a category later.
Keep the names you'll recognize on a statement. The AI import matches transactions against your existing category names, so names that describe real spending (“Software subscriptions”) get matched more reliably than accountant-speak (“6820 · Misc admin”).

Add these two while you're here

Net Net Books has no dedicated transfer type, so money you move between your own accounts shows up as two ordinary transactions. Create a Transfer in (income) and a Transfer out (expense) category now, and use them for account-to-account moves, credit card payments, and owner draws or contributions. They cancel each other out, so your net profit stays correct, and they're easy to spot and ignore on a P&L. Step 9 explains why this matters.

Prefer to skip ahead?

You can go straight to importing. When no existing category fits a line, the AI proposes a new one and you approve or rename it on the review screen. Creating your categories first just means more of your first import lands in the right bucket without any editing.

7 5 minutes per statement

Import your transactions

Go to Import → Upload a statement. Pick the account the file belongs to (or let the AI detect it), choose your file, and hit Parse.

Formats: PDF, CSV, TXT, Excel (.xlsx, .xlsm, .xls), and images (PNG, JPG, GIF, WEBP).
Size limit: 10 MB per file.
No cleanup needed. Upload the QuickBooks export exactly as it came out — title rows, blank columns, subtotals and all. The parser reads around them.
Parsing runs in the background. You'll land on a status page that updates itself; a long statement can take a minute or two, and you can leave the page.

Review before anything is recorded

When parsing finishes you get a review screen with every line the AI found. Nothing touches your books until you approve it. For each row you can:

Untick the checkbox to leave it out entirely.
Fix the date, description, or amount inline.
Reassign the row to a different account — useful when one export covers several accounts.
Pick a different category, or accept the proposed new one and rename it.

Then press Import transactions. You'll get a count of what was recorded, how many duplicates were skipped, and how many new categories were created.

Always spot-check the signs

Money out must be negative and money in positive. QuickBooks reports vary in how they present amounts depending on the report and the transaction type, so scan the Amount column on the review screen before you import — especially on your first file. A refund booked as an expense, or a payment booked as income, is the single most common source of a P&L that doesn't match.

Working through a backfill

Oldest first, one account and one period per file. Small files parse faster and are far easier to review.
Prefer CSV or Excel over PDF for bulk history. Spreadsheets cost a fraction of the AI budget that scanned PDFs do, because PDF pages are processed as images.
Re-importing is safe. A line with the same account, date, amount, and description is recognized as a duplicate and skipped, so overlapping statements won't double-count.
Made a mess? Undo it. Deleting an import from the Import list removes the transactions it created, and frees those lines to be imported again.
“Statement too long”? Split the file into smaller date ranges and import each part.

About the AI import budget

AI parsing is metered by input tokens and resets on the 1st of each calendar month. Free accounts get 150,000 tokens a month; Pro accounts get 1,500,000. Your remaining budget is shown on the dashboard and on the upload page.

Ordinary monthly bookkeeping fits comfortably in the free budget. A multi-year backfill of scanned PDF statements will not — either spread it across two or three months, feed it spreadsheets instead of PDFs, or email hello@netnetbooks.com to move to Pro.

8 5 minutes

Reconcile

Imported lines arrive already matched to the transactions they created, so a fresh migration usually has little to do here. The Reconcile screen earns its keep once you're also entering transactions by hand — a check you wrote, cash you took in — and the bank statement catches up a few days later.

Auto-matching pairs a bank line with a book transaction on the same account and the same exact amount:

Within 3 days — matched and marked reconciled automatically.
Within 10 days — offered as a suggestion for you to Confirm or Reject.
No match — use Match to pair it with an existing transaction, Create to book a new one from it, or Ignore to set it aside.

Added transactions after an import? Press Re-run auto-match to sweep the account again.

9 15 minutes · don't skip this

Check your numbers, then cancel

Run Reports → P&L for a period you also exported from QuickBooks on a cash basis, and compare. Then check each account's balance on the Accounts page against the closing balance on that account's real bank statement — that second check is the one that proves the migration.

When the numbers differ, it's almost always one of these

Accrual vs. cash. A QuickBooks P&L run on an accrual basis includes invoices you've sent but haven't been paid for, and bills you've entered but haven't paid. Net Net Books never will. Re-run the QuickBooks report on a cash basis before comparing.
Transfers between your own accounts. Moving $5,000 from checking to savings looks like $5,000 of expense and $5,000 of income. Net profit is unaffected, but your income and expense totals are both inflated — this is what the Transfer categories from Step 6 are for.
Credit card payments. Paying the card is a transfer, not an expense. The expense was already recorded when you made the purchase; categorizing the payment as an expense too counts it twice.
Owner draws and contributions. Real money moving, but not business income or expense. Give them their own categories so you can set them aside when you read the P&L.
Journal entries, depreciation, and accruals. No cash moved, so they don't exist in Net Net Books. Your accountant handles these at year end.
An “Uncategorized” line. Uncategorized transactions still count toward your income and expense totals — they're just grouped under “Uncategorized”. Click through to Transactions and assign them.
A duplicated or missing statement. The Import list shows every file you've brought in and the period it covered. Check for gaps and overlaps there first.

Before you cancel QuickBooks

Every business account exists here with the right opening balance.
Each account's balance matches its real bank statement.
Your cash-basis P&L for at least one overlapping period reconciles to QuickBooks, or you can explain every difference.
Your exported QuickBooks reports are saved somewhere you'll still have them in seven years.
Anyone else who touches your books — your accountant, your bookkeeper — knows about the change.

Then cancel. And if you ever want your data back out of Net Net Books, it's yours on demand: Account settings → Export gives you a zip of plain CSVs — accounts, categories, transactions, bank lines, and import history. No lock-in, no export fee, no waiting.