MYOB to QuickBooks · Migration

How to Migrate From MYOB to QuickBooks

Moving from MYOB to QuickBooks without losing your history, breaking your reconciliations, or spending weeks cleaning up afterward.

At QuickFix Bookkeeping, the thing that determines whether this goes well: clean the data before you move it, not after. Dirty data migrates perfectly. Duplicate suppliers, unreconciled bank lines, and misclassified accounts all transfer without complaint and are far harder to fix inside QuickBooks than they were in MYOB.

What Causes This

Not everything transfers

Bank reconciliations, payroll history, and custom reports generally do not migrate. Plan for it.

Dirty data carries over

Duplicates and misclassifications transfer cleanly and compound in the new system.

No verification benchmark

Without a trial balance from before the move, you cannot prove the migration was accurate.

Wrong timing

Migrating mid-year or during a busy period turns a controlled task into a crisis.

How to Fix It

METHOD 1Clean and Reconcile MYOB FirstBefore you export anything
1

Reconcile every bank and credit card account in MYOB up to your cut-off date. Do not migrate an unreconciled file.

2

Merge duplicate customers and suppliers, clear suspense accounts, and make inactive anything you no longer use. Every duplicate you leave becomes a duplicate in QuickBooks.

3

Finalise your payroll year and lodge outstanding STP and BAS obligations before moving. Payroll history is the least portable part of any migration.

METHOD 2Set a Cut-Off and Export Your BenchmarkThe verification step
1

Choose a cut-off date. The end of a financial year is by far the cleanest, since it avoids splitting a year across two systems.

2

From MYOB, export and save the trial balance, profit and loss, and balance sheet as at that date.

3

These are your benchmark. After migration, QuickBooks must produce identical figures. Without this, you have no way to prove the move was accurate, and you will not find out it was not until much later.

METHOD 3Decide How Much History to MoveScope the migration
1

Move your opening balances and the current financial year as a minimum. Most businesses do not need every historical transaction inside the new system.

2

Keep MYOB accessible in read-only form as your historical archive. ATO record-keeping obligations generally run to five years, so do not decommission it immediately.

3

Chart of accounts, customers, suppliers, and open invoices and bills transfer well. Bank reconciliation history and payroll history generally do not.

METHOD 4Verify Before You Go LiveDo not skip this
1

Once migrated, run the trial balance, profit and loss, and balance sheet in QuickBooks as at the cut-off date and compare against your MYOB benchmark line by line.

2

They must match. A difference means something did not transfer or transferred wrongly, and finding it now is vastly cheaper than finding it at year end.

3

Then reconcile your first month in QuickBooks before trusting the file. See our migration risk guide for the full checklist.

What Transfers, What Does Not

Data Transfers Cleanly Note
Chart of accountsYesAccount types may need remapping
Customers and suppliersYesDuplicates carry over unless cleaned first
Open invoices and billsYesMust reconcile to the cut-off date exactly
Historical transactionsPartlyOften imported as summary journals
Bank reconciliationsNoYou start fresh in QuickBooks
Payroll historyNoRe-enter year to date figures manually
Custom reportsNoRebuild in QuickBooks

Migrate at Year End

The single highest-value decision in any migration is timing. Moving at the end of a financial year means one clean set of books in the old system and one clean set in the new. Moving mid-year means every annual report for that year has to be assembled from two systems, every time, for as long as anyone asks for it.

Related Guides

Planning a Move Off MYOB?

Let QuickFix Bookkeeping Handle the Migration.

We clean your MYOB data, map and migrate it, then reconcile QuickBooks against your original trial balance so the numbers match exactly. Nothing lost, nothing to clean up afterward.

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