Moving from QuickBooks Online

If your books live in QuickBooks Online, you can bring your bank and credit card transactions into Pennyweight. You export reports to Excel, your AI reads them and sends the rows to Pennyweight, one account at a time. New to importing? Start with how importing works.

Export from QuickBooks Online

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

• The General Ledger. Go to Reports, then Standard reports. Search for General Ledger and select it, choose the report period, then select Export to Excel from the Export/Print or More actions menu.
• Your account list. Go to Reports, then Standard reports, select Account List, then Export/Print, then Export to Excel. It helps you match each QuickBooks account to a Pennyweight account.
• Everything at once. Go to Settings, then Export data under Tools. Choose a reason, pick a date range on the Reports tab, turn on the reports and lists you want, and select Export to Excel. You get the Excel files in one .zip file.
• Your bank rules. Go to All apps, then Accounting, then Rules. Open the New rule dropdown and choose Export rules. The rules come as an Excel file.
• Attachments. Go to Settings, then Attachments, select the files, then Batch actions, then Export. They come as a .zip file. Keep it yourself: attachments don't move to Pennyweight.

If you cancel a paid QuickBooks Online subscription, you keep read-only access to your data for one year and can still export during that time, per QuickBooks' help center. A cancelled trial keeps your data for 90 days.

How to do it

1. Share the General Ledger export with your AI.
2. Tell it which accounts in the report are your bank and credit card accounts, and which Pennyweight account each one goes into. Ask it to leave every other account out.
3. Ask your AI to use the account on the other side of each line, such as Groceries or Utilities, as the category.
4. If an 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 just before the first row. For a card, give what you owed as a positive number. See add a manual account.
5. Your AI shows a preview for each account: new rows, likely duplicates and rows that need a look. Nothing is saved yet. See reading an import preview.
6. Say yes to import, then check the result with after you import.

What you'll see

For the first prompt, your AI reads the report, converts the dates to YYYY-MM-DD and leaves out the title and total lines. It shows one preview for Everyday Checking and one for Rewards Card, each with 7 new transactions and categories such as Groceries and Transit. After you say yes, it reports the rows saved in each account.

For the second, your AI lists the two accounts in the report, Everyday Checking and Rewards Card, with 7 transactions each. Nothing is saved.

What carries over

Each row brings its date, amount, payee, category text, currency and notes. Invoices, bills, receivables and payables, payroll, inventory, classes, locations and attachments stay in QuickBooks. See the full list of what doesn't move.

Good to know

• Your AI does the reading. Pennyweight has no QuickBooks importer. Uploading a file straight to Pennyweight works for CSV only, so an Excel export always goes through your AI.
• One account per import. Each import goes into a single account, so your AI sends one batch for each bank or card account in the report.
• Dates and signs. The rows your AI sends need dates written as YYYY-MM-DD and amounts signed from the account's side: money out is negative, money in is positive. On a card, a charge is negative and a payment is positive. Your AI converts both before it sends the rows.
• Totals and blank lines are left out. Every row needs a date, an amount and a payee. A total line with no date would stop the whole batch, so your AI drops those lines first.
• Transfers appear twice. A payment from checking to your card shows up in both accounts. Import each side into its own account, then ask your AI to find the pair and link it. See link transfers.
• Categories and rules. Imported rows keep their QuickBooks categories unless one of your active Pennyweight rules matches. Rules run when the import is saved, and a matching rule's category replaces the one from the file. To keep every QuickBooks category, ask your AI to import with rules turned off. Pennyweight doesn't import rules files, so use your exported rules as a list to recreate. Rules you recreate before importing categorize the rows as they're saved. See rebuild your rules after moving.
• Years of history. For many accounts or a long date range, ask your AI to plan the import first. See import years of history across many accounts.