Moving from FreshBooks

If you kept your business books in FreshBooks, you can bring your spending history into Pennyweight. Export your expenses or your General Ledger, give the file to your AI, and it sends the rows to Pennyweight one account at a time. Nothing is saved until you approve a preview. New to importing? Start with how importing works.

Export from FreshBooks

These steps are per FreshBooks' help center, and its menus can change.

• Your expenses. Go to Expenses, select More Actions, then Export Expenses. Choose a date range and a currency, then select Download CSV. You get a CSV file of all active and archived expenses. Every row in it is money out, so it's the simplest file to start from.
• The General Ledger. Go to Reports and choose General Ledger under Accounting Reports. Select More Actions, then Export for Excel, which downloads the report as a CSV file. It's only on the Plus, Premium and Select plans, and it starts from January 1, 2018. It shows one currency at a time.
• Your chart of accounts. Go to Accounting, then Chart of Accounts, then More Actions and Export Accounts. It helps you match each FreshBooks account to a Pennyweight account.
• Receipts. Export Expense Receipts, under More Actions in Expenses, downloads your receipt images in bulk. Keep them yourself: Pennyweight doesn't store receipt files.

If you plan to cancel, export first. Per FreshBooks' help center, you keep access until the end of your billing cycle, and accounts inactive for 30 days or more may be deactivated and deleted.

How to do it

1. Share the expenses CSV with your AI, and say which Pennyweight account the expenses were paid from, such as your business checking.
2. If the file covers expenses paid from more than one account, ask your AI to split it and import one batch per account.
3. If the account doesn't exist in Pennyweight yet, ask your AI to add it. A new manual account needs an opening balance before its first import: the balance at the start of the file's period. For a credit card, give what you owed as a positive number. See add a manual account.
4. Check the preview: new rows, likely duplicates, rows that need a look, and how the balance would change. Nothing is saved yet. See reading an import preview.
5. Say yes to import, then check the result with after you import.

What you'll see

Your AI tells Pennyweight the whole batch is money out of the account. The preview shows each expense as a negative amount, the account's balance going down, and the FreshBooks categories it found. After you say yes, your AI reports how many rows were saved and lists any skipped row with the reason.

What carries over

Each row brings its date, amount, payee, category text, currency and notes. Invoices, clients, estimates, payroll and receipt images stay in FreshBooks. See the full list of what doesn't move.

Good to know

• Expenses are money out. Per FreshBooks' help center, every expense you record counts as money leaving your account. When your AI declares a batch as money out, Pennyweight saves every row in it as money out, whatever sign the file used. A deposit or a payment in the same batch would be saved as spending too, so leave those out or tell your AI the batch goes both ways.
• Refunds. Per FreshBooks' help center, a refund is recorded by lowering the expense's Grand Total, to $0 for a full refund, not as money coming back in. So refunds don't need their own rows.
• Your AI does the reading. Pennyweight has no FreshBooks importer. Your AI converts each date to YYYY-MM-DD before it sends the rows.
• The General Ledger lists every account. Per FreshBooks' help center, it shows the transactions for each account, and its Accounts filter lets you pick a single account. Pick your bank or card account before exporting, or ask your AI to keep only that account's lines. Check the balance change in the preview before you say yes.
• One currency at a time. Per FreshBooks' help center, the expenses export asks for a currency, and the General Ledger shows one currency at a time. If you recorded expenses in more than one, export each separately. An import stores each amount in its own currency without converting it.
• Linked bank accounts. If business checking is linked to your bank, Pennyweight already has its recent history from the bank. Import only the expenses older than that, so the same spending doesn't land twice.
• Categories come over unless a rule matches. Each row keeps its FreshBooks category text. Your active Pennyweight rules run when the import is saved, and a matching rule's category replaces the one from FreshBooks. The preview shows how many rows your rules would change. To keep every FreshBooks category as it is, ask your AI to import with rules turned off.
• Rules don't move. Rules you add after the import change rows already saved only when your AI applies them. See rebuild your rules after moving.