Move your books from QuickBooks
Seven exports, in one order, and a single check that tells you it worked: Opening Balance Equity comes back to zero.
Before you start
Two decisions come before any file leaves QuickBooks, and both are hard to change afterwards.
Set your Migration Boundary. One date: the last day QuickBooks is authoritative, and the day Pippin’s books open. Every export below is taken as at that date. It locks on your first import, because everything already taken is dated against it.
Run your QuickBooks reports on accrual, not cash. This is the one that catches people. The check at the end — Opening Balance Equity returning to zero — only works on accrual, because a cash-basis trial balance has no receivables or payables in it to take out.
Try it in a sandbox first. Settings › Import your books offers a sandbox org at the top of the page. It is a real Pippin org with its own books, so you can run the whole sequence, read the result, and throw it away. Nothing you do there touches your live org.
The order is the feature
Seven steps. The first five block each other for real reasons — an open invoice whose client is not here yet is refused rather than guessed at, and an opening balance has nowhere to post without a chart of accounts. Steps 6 and 7 sit outside that chain.
| # | Step | What it brings |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Chart of accounts | Only if you are bringing your own |
| 2 | Clients | Before receivables, which need them |
| 3 | Opening balances | Your trial balance, exported whole |
| 4 | Open payables | Unpaid supplier bills, as bills |
| 5 | Open receivables | What clients still owe |
| 6 | Services | Your catalog — needed before your first invoice |
| 7 | Prior monthly totals | Optional, reporting only |
Getting the reports out of QuickBooks
Trial Balance — Reports › For my accountant › Trial Balance. Not under Business overview, which is where most people look first. Set the date to your Migration Boundary and the basis to Accrual.
Unpaid Bills — Reports › What you owe › Unpaid Bills. Two columns you need are off by default: open Customise › Rows/Columns and switch on Num and Date.
Open Invoices — Reports › Who owes you › Open Invoices.
Customers, Vendors, Products and Services — each list exports from its own page, via the export icon above the table.
3 · Opening balances
Export the trial balance whole. Do not edit it.
This is worth stating plainly because older instructions said the opposite. You do not delete the A/R and A/P rows, and you do not work out the Opening Balance Equity plug yourself. Pippin takes the receivables and payables control balances out, moves their difference to Opening Balance Equity, and posts the rest as one dated, balanced entry.
Steps 4 and 5 then bring that difference back to zero, by creating the actual bills and invoices behind it.
4 · Open payables, and vendors
Every unpaid bill arrives as a bill you can pay in Pippin, at its original date — not as a single number. This step also creates every vendor you owed money to, so there is no separate vendor import to run first.
Vendors you were square with are a separate, optional import, on the Vendors page. Worth doing: without it, a supplier with no open bill has to be typed in by hand the next time you enter one.
5 · Open receivables
What your clients still owed, as Balance-Forward Invoices.
This step is the one that cannot be undone in bulk. It creates real Stripe invoices. Nobody is emailed — but where the first four steps can be rolled back a batch at a time, these cannot. Run the first four, read the result, and only then run this one.
The check: Opening Balance Equity returns to zero
After step 5, open Reports › Balance Sheet and look at Opening Balance Equity.
Zero means it tied out. The plug that step 3 created has been fully accounted for by the bills and invoices that steps 4 and 5 brought in.
Not zero means something is missing, and the amount tells you what: it is the difference between the receivables and payables in your trial balance and the documents that actually arrived. The usual causes are a cash-basis trial balance, a bill or invoice that failed its row and was skipped, or an export taken on a different date from the Boundary.
What never comes across
Three things, and none of them is an omission to work around.
Paid invoices. Pippin’s invoices are Stripe’s, and a paid invoice from another system has no way to exist here. Your position carries; the paperwork behind it stays in QuickBooks.
Historical payments. A payment in Pippin is defined by what it is applied to, and there are no closed invoices here to apply one to.
General ledger detail. This one is a choice. An opening trial balance already carries prior years’ results inside retained earnings, so importing the detail behind them would count the same profit twice.
Keep QuickBooks read-only access for as long as your retention rules ask for. The history stays there, and that is the intended answer rather than a gap.
If it went wrong
The first four steps are undone by batch — Settings › Import your books, one batch at a time, most recent first. Undoing everything releases the Migration Boundary, so you can change the date and start again.
Step 5 is the exception, as above.
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.