Switch from another accounting system

Moving from QuickBooks, Xero or another package is one path: upload the trial balance your accountant closed the old books on, and TALISK_HQ builds your chart of accounts, your bank accounts and your starting balances from it.

You bring balances across, not history. Your old system keeps the detail for prior years. That is the normal way to change accounting systems, and it is what your accountant expects.

The whole path runs inside the Set up your books wizard, whose five steps are Your year, Bring your books across, Opening balances, Your bank, and A few things to check. You can also run the middle of it on its own from Ledger › Accounting, using the Import from accountant documents button on either the Opening Balances or the Chart of Accounts screen.

1. Upload the trial balance

TALISK_HQ accepts your adjusted trial balance as a PDF, Excel (.xlsx) or CSV file. A spreadsheet is read directly and deterministically; a PDF is read in the background.

QuickBooks Online exports a trial balance to Excel only. There is no CSV option there, so the .xlsx file is the QuickBooks route. Xero exports both.

Only an adjusted trial balance is supported: a balance sheet or a profit and loss is politely rejected rather than half-read. If you leave the import part way through, the Import from accountant documents button changes to Continue import and names the step you stopped at, so you can pick it back up from either screen.

2. Review the chart of accounts

Nothing is written to your books until you press Apply on this screen. It lists every line from your trial balance under From the trial balance, its Balance, and where it Goes to: a new account, one of your existing accounts, or skipped. The summary line counts each. Accept all suggestions puts every row back to what TALISK_HQ proposed.

Accounts on your trial balance that carry no balance are grouped at the bottom. They still define the shape of your chart, so they are kept by default, and Skip all drops them in one click if you would rather start lean.

Three things on this screen are worth knowing before you use it.

If your file does not say what an account is, you have to. A trial balance that never states whether a row is an asset, liability, equity, income or expense arrives untyped, and the screen asks you to pick a type for each one before it will apply. Apply stays disabled until you do, and its label tells you how many are left. There is no way past it, and that is deliberate: TALISK_HQ will not guess, because the wrong choice puts a balance on the wrong statement. To avoid the step, export with the types included. In Xero, tick Group by Account Type.

A spreadsheet tells you which columns it read. Some exports print more than one pair of Debit and Credit columns, such as a period pair and a year-to-date pair. TALISK_HQ states which pair it used, how many accounts it found, and the totals it read, so you can check that is the right set of figures before anything is applied. A PDF import shows no such line, because there are no columns to name.

Two rows landing on the same account number get flagged. They would merge into one account, with the balances summed and the separate accounts lost, so Apply stays disabled until you tick Yes, merge them on purpose. Mapping several rows onto one account you already have is different: that is deliberate netting, and it is not flagged.

3. Confirm any balances read on the wrong side

If the debits and credits do not reconcile to the total printed on your document, TALISK_HQ shows you the rows most likely to be the cause, tagged check the column, with the amount it is off by. Each row has a button to move it to the other side.

This is advice, not a gate. Deficits, overdrawn accounts and contra accounts legitimately sit on the unusual side, so if the flagged rows are right as they are, Continue anyway moves you on.

4. Set up the bank accounts your trial balance names

Rows that look like bank or credit-card accounts get their own step. For each one you can add it as a bank account or a card, link it to an account you already have in Banking, or skip it. A row already matched to an account shows as connected. If TALISK_HQ missed one, you can add any other row to the list yourself.

Each account is created on the ledger account your trial balance already used, so your accountant's own numbering carries over and no duplicate account is minted. That is what lets each bank show as its own line on your balance sheet and reconcile against its own statement later.

The balance shown here is the one your trial balance carries. It is shown so you can verify it, and nothing is booked by this step. Each account's starting balance reaches Banking when you post your opening balances on the next step, so no figure is ever counted twice.

The whole step is optional. Skip this step takes every row through untouched, and you can add the accounts by hand in Banking later.

5. Clear anything already on the books before your changeover

If your book already holds entries dated on or before your trial balance date, TALISK_HQ lists them before opening balances and offers to move them to reference. Their amounts already sit inside your accountant's balances, so leaving them posted would count everything twice.

Your documents stay. Bills, PDFs and bank transactions remain viewable; only their ledger entries are removed, and a permanent record of exactly what changed is kept on the import. Two things it will not do on its own: entries you typed in yourself are left alone for you to review in the Journal, and any bill still unpaid at your changeover date is listed against your accountant's Accounts Payable figure so you can check with them whether it was actually paid.

6. Post your opening balances

This is the step that matters most, because it sets your conversion date: the line between history that is already inside your balances and live activity from here on.

The figures arrive pre-filled from your trial balance. Check them, then post. TALISK_HQ writes one balanced journal entry on your conversion date; any remainder goes to an equity account, which at a year-end date is retained earnings and mid-year usually means a typo. Re-saving replaces that entry rather than adding to it. See Enter opening balances for the screen itself.

7. Connect your bank last

Your bank comes after your opening balances, never before. Posting them is what tells TALISK_HQ where your history ends. Bank feeds and statements usually reach back a month or three, so some of what arrives will be dated before your start date; TALISK_HQ files those as reference and never posts them twice, because those amounts are already inside your opening balances. Do it the other way round and there is no start date to compare against, so that older activity posts as though it were new and your books count it twice.

There are two routes, both on the wizard's Your bank step and on Ledger › Banking › Statements. Upload a statement as a CSV, OFX/QFX or PDF file, which works today for every account. Or connect the bank directly, which is being enabled account by account: if you do not see a Connect option yet, use the statement route in the meantime. Because you set up your bank accounts from the trial balance in step 4, either route attaches to the account it belongs to instead of creating a second one.

See Connect a bank or add a statement for both routes, and Manage bank accounts and opening balances for the accounts themselves.

If you do not have a trial balance

You are not stuck. Under the upload button on Bring your books across there is a quiet "set my balances up by hand" link, and the Opening Balances screen takes the figures typed in directly. You end up in the same place; it just takes longer. Every step of the wizard can be skipped, and none of them blocks you.