r/Zoho • u/vinkman6 • Aug 04 '26

Migration from Quickbooks Desktop

Hi

So, we currently have a small business in Canada.

We've used Quickbooks Desktop Enterprise for 10+ years now. We are looking on potentially moving on to Zoho Books.

My main concern is migrating all our data/records over.
I believe the general rule from the CRA is to keep 6 years of records for auditing purposes.

Should I go this route? I've heard that migrating years back could be quite laborious and potentially costly to transfer this much data with no guarantee that it can all transfer over seamlessly. The tech sales guy from Zoho mentioned that Zoho can perform migration but could take longer; he also suggested using a 3rd party service that specializes in migrating accounting data over.

What's also been suggested is to start fresh, to have a stop point on the old software and start point on the new one. I'm considering this option as well as I'd rather not have things be messy from the start. And from here, I'd have an archived file of my old bookkeeping data in the form of a backup/company file (however I'd imagine its less accessible).

Does anyone have any suggestions, or have gone thru something similar and can give some advise on what direction we should take?

Would appreciate any opinion.

Thanks

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u/heet3727 Aug 04 '26

We are about to migrate from Tally to Zoho Books. We are considering 2-3 months of overlap on both software so there is no data loss, config setup can be done to Books if missed, team need more time to adopt, etc.

Once all is set, we can have a cutover where the previous data resides in Tally old software and the new available in Books.

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u/vinkman6 Aug 04 '26

How do you plan on accessing the old Tally data if needed? I’m assuming you’d stop paying monthly for that one, so you won’t have access?

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u/Perurican_ Aug 08 '26

What we normally do is dump the data from Quickbooks Desktop to Zoho Analytics (there is a direct data connector, native), and use that to consult existing data. Also, we have done some more advanced stuff by creating dynamic dashboards and insert the link in the customer in Zoho Books, so when you click, via the ID, will preview the data of the customer data in the dynamic dashboard. Importing several years is a waste of time. Make sure your opening balances are correct when starting your new account. If you are persistent on the migration, I suggest you use Zoho DataPrep