Copy lists QBO

Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. So I wanted to do a short tutorial on how to move vendor lists, customer lists, and your chart of accounts from one company file to another, basically from one QuickBooks Online file to another. So you may be wondering, why would you need to do that? Well, if you have a business like a real estate company, And many times they're set up as LLCs, and you may buy one building and then it does well and you buy another property and you end up using the same electrician, the same plumber. So you want to move those over to your new company. For my example today, what I'll do is I'm going to take my customer list from Artisani Bookkeeping and move this over to some of them over to my new company, which is just my training. I'm just going to separate my business. One part's bookkeeping and my other business will be my training in QuickBooks Online. So how do I move my list? Well, I'm sure you've all seen in the gear you've got import and export data. Unfortunately, the export data is basically to take your file and move it from online to desktop or make a copy and keep a backup of it. So how can you move the file, move just the list items, right? So if you come in here, you can see that this says you need to use Explorer. And, you know, another way is to move your data over by using Excel reports. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to actually come over to Excel and create an Excel spreadsheet. So here's my vendors, and I just want to move my vendors over. So I can click this little button, it's just going to export my list to Excel, and then I can pick and choose the transactions that I want out of it. So here's the vendor list that's exported, and you can see this is all the names that I have in here, and I don't really want to move all of these over. So if I try to go to my other file here, so my new company which is called Sample Company, if I try to move these over and import them, I would click here, and here is where you will come to import, and I'm just going to import my vendors. If I try to pull from that one file that just exported out of my other file, one would think that that's where I should go. If I go right to this vendor list and try to pull it in, you'll see that I'm going to have trouble because the vendor list itself, the one I just showed you, this one isn't set up the way it should be set up to import. So if I try to bring it in, you can see already it can't see the name, which I can come over here and select vendor. But if I come over here, you'll see that there's red stuff everywhere because it's seeing the name of the vendor and actually part of the address is the street, but it's not pulling the whole thing in and I'd have trouble pulling this in. So how do I pull it in? Well, what I would do here is if I come over to vendors, you'll see this little thing that says download a sample file. If you click on that, it'll bring you to this lovely little sample file. And let me go back here. So the sample file is here, and this is what it would look like in the sample file. I know it's not very big here. View, bring it in here. Well, you can see it's just set up differently, but this is how you want to see it. Name, company, email, phone, all that information you want to pull through. This is also a really fine way if you were starting a new company file completely from scratch. If you're missing information. So I would take this file and open up my file that I have here, highlight this, and copy and paste it over because it's going to be in the right categories. I do it line by line, so I just come over here and select this column, copy it, paste it over here under name, and just overwrite what's in the sample file. And just keep coming through. Obviously I'm going to remove anything that's not part of mine. So anything part of that sample file, I'm going to remove and take that out of the file. And then just go back and forth with your data. So you want to make sure that the data is brought over exactly as it is. So I've got to bring that over, I've got to bring the company over here, and that's the same names. So maybe I want to take the time to fill the emails in and put them in here. Maybe I want to take the time to fill the phone numbers in and put them in here. Maybe I want to take the time and put the streets in and make sure this is all up to date. So when I do go to pull this in, it's going to pull in the file the right way. So once I'm done pre-formulating that and copying and pasting it to the categories that are in that file, I should be done and my file should pretty much look like this. And you can see my names here, the company names. I can obviously copy here and roll down and paste and make it look like it's supposed to look. And I could fill all this in. Now I'm ready for the file, so I'm going to save this one, close it out. I named it a different name so I know it's my QuickBooks Online vendor list as opposed to this is the one I downloaded and here's my sample. So I renamed it, I didn't use the word sample, and then I'm just going to come over here and attach it and then hit next. And now it's seeing all these categories. I didn't fill in emails or phone and everything. If I did, it would be all green. Checkmarks. You want to see green. Hit the word next, and you can see here it's having trouble with the street. This is not a street. There's the street. So I want to make sure that I take off— in my file, I wasn't exact. So when you see things like that, you want to make sure that you clean it up properly and that it's completely done well here. If you're pulling in a really big list it'll go on and on and on. So this could be a huge list that I'm copying over. I find it's better to take it in pieces and chunks. That way you can kind of keep controls on it and see where the red boxes are if there's an issue. Sometimes it's hard to find if you're pulling like 500 vendors in, so I would do it maybe chunks of 100 or even a little bit less than that and move it across that way. So I'm going to hit Import. So you can see I have an issue here where there's one name in red. And it's because I already have it in the system, so it's a duplicate. So I'm not going to bring that name in, and then I'm done. Now I can come back here. So 7 of the 8 vendors imported successfully. One did not import because it was a duplicate, and then my names are all in here. So I'm really happy that my names came through. It's really important to do these steps nice and slowly though. You want to make sure that you get your file in properly. You don't want to have duplication, like I've got Florida Department of Revenue to Florida Department of State, Florida Department of State. You know, I can rename this one, so I can just come over since I did duplicate it, and I can come over here and just copy my name, and then come back to my list, edit this one, paste my name. I don't want to Florida Department of States. It's going to merge the 2. Now I've only got one. So, but it's easier to clean it up as you go along than to clean it up, make a mess and clean it up. Also a very smart tip that I highly recommend before you import or import anything in your file, whether it's add an app which will import data or do this kind of work, back up your file. I highly recommend it. I use ChronoBooks. Great program. It backs up in the background. It's just a safety net for you to make sure that you don't ruin a QuickBooks Online file. We don't have the ability just to go back to a desktop file and find that backup and restore to a date in the, in the past. So with ChronoBooks, you do have that. So I'll share a link to ChronoBooks in the notes in my blog. But I wanted to at least give you an idea of how to pull these things in. And it's a time saver. Lots of steps. Be meticulous about it. It's a time saver. So I hope that's helpful. I know it's a lot of information. I hope it was helpful. I'll step it out in the directions on the blog post as well. Thank you for watching. Bye now. Bye.