Sage BusinessWorks to QuickBooks: exporting and converting your data

Sage BusinessWorks is a capable but ageing platform, and the firms still running it usually reach a point where staying put costs more than moving. The migration to QuickBooks is very achievable — the one thing that makes it different from converting Sage 50 or AccountEdge is how the data comes out. BusinessWorks doesn’t hand you a tidy export; you pull it from the underlying database.

The export is a query, not a click

Where some accounting systems export lists and transactions with a menu command, BusinessWorks stores its data in a database that’s reached with a SQL query. Practically, that means pulling the tables you need — chart of accounts, customers, vendors, items, open transactions — via a query against the database, rather than exporting from the front end. Once that extract exists, the rest of the migration looks familiar: you map the fields once, and that mapping is reused on every subsequent run.

Prepare before you extract

• Choose a cutover date on a reconciled period end.
• Produce a trial balance and AR/AP aging from BusinessWorks as of that date — your source of truth for reconciling.
• Decide your scope: balances and open items, or fuller history (see how much history to bring).

The conversion, in order

1. Map the extract once. Because BusinessWorks fields don’t line up one-to-one with QuickBooks, each column maps to its QuickBooks field and each account to the right type. Saved as a named profile, this only has to be done once.
2. Chart of accounts first, with correct account types.
3. Customers, vendors and items, de-duplicated.
4. Opening balances as a single journal dated the day before go-live; AR and AP as itemised open documents.
5. Reconcile the QuickBooks trial balance to BusinessWorks, account by account.

What to watch

• Field-level surprises. Data pulled straight from a database can carry codes, flags or formats the front end normally hid — clean these in mapping.
• Account types. As always, a mis-typed account passes the import but quietly distorts reports.
• Historical scope. Because you’re querying the database directly, it’s tempting to pull everything. Decide deliberately what history earns its place.