Lynda ArtesaniLegal Accountant and Data Migration Specialist at The Proper Trust

Why Your Trial Balance Looks Different After Your QBD Data Migration

2 Sept 2025 · 1 min

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In this segment, the speaker explains why a trial balance often looks markedly different after a QuickBooks Desktop (QBD) data migration. They advise that, when the migrated balances are far off, it can be prudent to start a fresh company file, compare the migrated data against the final tax return, and extract only the essential reports needed for ongoing work. The speaker also warns against using journal‑entry import methods to load historical transactions, as this can create retained‑earnings mismatches and other accounting issues.

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The trial balance doesn't even look remotely close to what you had in the file. Um, so to answer your question is sometimes it makes sense to start a new file, look at the data, look at the final tax return. Mm-hmm. Start a fresh file and then maybe go through and just pull out the key reports that are relevant to you and understand that you're just going to be living with, I mean, we've seen people, uh, Lynda, do what, journal entry methods to get historical data in and that creates retained earning issues.