Moving from spreadsheets (or another app)

Most people land on GBooks Air coming from a spreadsheet, a shoebox of receipts, or an app whose subscription stopped feeling worth paying. The good news is migration is mostly a decision you make, not a data-entry marathon you have to run.

Pick a conversion date

In order of preference, the cleanest cutover points are usually:

1. Start of your fiscal year — one system per tax year, which your accountant will thank you for.
2. Start of a quarter — good if you file GST/HST quarterly, so each return comes entirely from one system.
3. Start of a month — perfectly fine mid-year, as long as you keep your old records around for the earlier months.

Everything before your conversion date stays put in the old system (and keep it — the CRA expects business records retained for six years). Everything after moves into GBooks Air.

What's worth bringing over

• Bank history from the conversion date forward. Export CSVs from your bank and run them through the Smart-Mapper. This alone usually covers 90% of the migration.
• Unpaid invoices. Re-create anything a customer still owes on, dated as it was originally issued, so your A/R aging tells the truth from day one.
• Customers and vendors you actually deal with. Add them as you go rather than bulk-loading a contact list full of people you haven't invoiced in years.
• Opening balances — your bank balance as of the conversion date, plus any loan or credit card balances, so your position reports start off accurate.

What's not worth bringing over

• Historical transaction detail. Don't re-key last year line by line. Your old records stay the system of record for that period.
• Paid invoices and settled bills. Nothing about them carries forward, so there's no point.
• Categories that never quite worked. A migration is the one free shot you get at a cleaner chart of accounts. Take it.

Coming from QuickBooks, Wave, or similar

Export whatever the app will let you — most give you CSVs of transactions, customer lists, and reports. You don't need their proprietary backup format. Bank CSVs, a customer list, and opening balances rebuild everything that actually matters. Before your old subscription lapses, also grab PDF copies of prior-year financial statements and any filed tax reports for your own archive.

Checking the cutover actually worked

After your first full month in GBooks Air, check one number: does the bank balance in the app match your real bank statement? If it does, the migration worked. If it doesn't, the gap is almost always a missed transfer or a duplicate import — see the month-end close tutorial for a reconciliation habit that's worth keeping around either way.