Set your Migration Boundary
The day your old system stopped and Pippin's books start. Every opening import is dated from it, and it locks on the first import.
Before you start
The Migration Boundary is one date: the last day your old system is authoritative, and the day Pippin’s books open.
It is not a preference. Every part of the opening import measures from it — the opening trial balance is dated at it, Balance-Forward Invoices are dated at it, and the age of everything your Clients owe is counted from it rather than from today.
A month on or after the Boundary cannot be imported as a prior monthly total, because it is already in the ledger and a summary beside it would be counted twice in the same P&L. Pippin refuses those rows and names the boundary in the refusal.
Pick the end of a month, and ideally the end of a quarter or a fiscal year — it is where your old system’s figures are already agreed.
What comes across
A Migration brings the position your books are in and the documents still outstanding. It does not bring your history.
| Arrives | Does not |
|---|---|
| The opening trial balance, as one balanced entry | Closed Invoices |
| Open Bills, at their original dates | Historical Payments |
| What Clients still owe, as Balance-Forward Invoices | General ledger detail |
| Chart of Accounts, Clients and Services | |
| Prior monthly totals, for reporting only |
The third refusal is a choice rather than a wall, and it is the one worth understanding. An opening trial balance already carries every prior year’s result inside retained earnings. Importing the detail behind those years would count the same profit twice — once as history, once as equity.
Vendors arrive with the Bills you owed them — importing open payables creates every vendor behind them, so there is no vendor step to run first. Vendors you were square with are a separate, optional import on the Vendors page.
Prior monthly totals are the exception to all of this. They never reach the ledger. They are income and expense figures from before the Boundary, kept so a year-over-year report does not fall off a cliff at the cutover.
Steps
- Open Settings › Import your books. Rehearse this first sits above the numbered steps: a sandbox Org with its own books, on Stripe test mode, that you can run the whole sequence in and then delete. Nothing in it can become real — that is the point, not a limitation.
- Set the Migration Boundary. It is answered once, here, above the steps, so that every import below agrees about it.
- Work down the seven steps in the order they are numbered. The first five block each other for real reasons; steps 6 and 7 sit outside that chain. See Move your books from QuickBooks for what to export for each one.
- Export your trial balance whole, and do not edit it. Pippin takes the A/R and A/P control balances out for you, moves their difference to Opening Balance Equity, and posts the rest as one dated, balanced entry. Each import previews what it will create, update or leave alone before writing anything.
- Import open payables, then open receivables. These two bring that difference back to zero, by creating the actual Bills and Invoices behind it.
- Check the result at the foot of the same page, under Migration verification. The check that settles it is Opening Balance Equity nets to zero; every failing check names the amount it is off by, because the amount is what tells you what is missing.
Good to know
The Boundary locks on the first import. It has to: everything already taken is dated against it. It releases on its own once nothing imported remains, so the way to change your mind is to undo the imports — Settings › Import your books, one batch at a time.
Found three Bills and two Invoices you missed? Run the Import again. A re-run adds: it takes what is new and refuses every document it has already taken. There is no need to start over, and no way to double up by trying.
Rehearse first. An open receivables import creates real, finalized Stripe invoices against real customers, and the only way back from a mistaken batch is voiding them one at a time. Settings › Import your books offers a sandbox Org at the top of the page for exactly this — and because a sandbox runs on Stripe test mode, there is no promote: you rehearse, learn what your exports need, throw it away, and then do it once for real.
This article is maintained alongside the import flow. If a step here does not match what Settings › Import your books says, the app is right and this is stale — tell us and we will fix it. Last reconciled against the flow on 22 September 2026.