In this tutorial, Linda Artesani walks attorneys, accountants, and bookkeepers through the process of importing a client ledger (client and matter list) and associated trust liability accounts into QuickBooks Online. She begins by showing the raw Excel export from a legacy system, explains the required formatting for QuickBooks—including the exact account name structure, account type (Other Current Liability), and detail type (Trust Account Liability). She demonstrates copying the QuickBooks import template, aligning columns, and ensuring the detail type matches precisely. Artesani highlights the need for a parent trust account to correctly nest sub‑accounts, and she shares an Excel shortcut (concatenation formula with = and &) to prepend "Funds held in trust" to each liability name efficiently. She advises backing up the QuickBooks file using the built‑in Advanced backup or a third‑party tool like Rewind, and explains how to purge an incorrectly imported list if needed. Finally, she walks through the import wizard, optional account renumbering, and confirms the successful appearance of the trust accounts in the Chart of Accounts. The video ends with a call to action for viewers to subscribe and seek further accounting assistance.
Chapters
Hi there, Linda Artesani, Artesani Accounting. And we're continuing in our series of setting up a client in QuickBooks Online, or if you're an attorney, setting up your own books on QuickBooks Online. And this week we've gone through— basically, we've gone through the steps of setting up the file and such. And now we're moving on to importing the client ledger list, which will also be your client list. So it's a kind of a twofold import here. So I'm going to take you into the screen where I've got my data already in an Excel spreadsheet, and then what we'll do is we'll go into the download in QuickBooks and then find that formatting and then copy it over. Let me share my screen. So here we are inside my Excel spreadsheet. This is an Excel spreadsheet that I've exported out of what I was using prior to QuickBooks. Now, if you were doing a spreadsheet and kind of keeping this separate somewhere, you are going to want to migrate this into some kind of a list like this. QuickBooks has this particular way of importing, and you're going to find that this list has to be formatted in a specific way. So you can see over here with William Aldridge, he's— that's the parent or the matter name, client name. And then here we see Aldridge William and a colon with no spaces, and then the number divorce. That's his matter. So it has to be formatted in this fashion in order for it to be pulled in as a sub-account. Now, the way QuickBooks imports— this is why I'm going to grab that template and copy over the columns— is because it can't read— if you have this big title on the form, it can't read these important headers, which is part of how it will link and sync up into QuickBooks into the right buckets when you get the contacts up. So you want to make sure that you don't have that title form on there. It really truly is best to go grab that template and migrate everything over. So I'm going to go over to the template, show you the template, and then I'll pause the video so I can get the data over so you can see. You don't need to watch me copy and paste. So let's move over to the template. So here we are in my other sample file, and I'm going to go over here to the gear, and I'm coming over here just to show you what the import should look like with QuickBooks. And you can see Import Data. If you come over here, you can see Customers. This is going to be a Chart of Accounts listing, and then we're going to take and copy that tab and make it for Customers. So I'm going to grab this and then grab this sample. I'm just going to show you what the sample looks like. And this is the sample that is, um, the formatting that it needs. So you need to have— you can have the account number, you don't have to have the account number. Account name, which would be your matter, your client and your matter, and then type would be other current liability, and the detail type will be trust account liability. So I'm going to copy and paste it over, and I'll come back in a moment and show you what that looks like. So I've completed the copying, pasting, and making sure that the words are exactly the way they should be. So if you see here, trust accounts with a space and a hyphen and a space and liabilities, you have to make sure that this detail type matches the exact, right? So it'll, it'll, it'll tell you there's an error in trying to import it if it's not written exactly. So Other Current Liability, let's go check and make sure that that's what it's called. So let's just quick— quickly pop into QuickBooks and then go to Accounting and then go to the Chart of Accounts here. And I'm just going to pop it like I'm making a new account. I'm going to pick Other Current Liabilities. So you can see here, it's called Other Current Liabilities. It's not called Other Current liability, QuickBooks wouldn't know how to import that. So I'm going to go back and change on my spreadsheet Other Current Liabilities, and then it will pull through. So this is how I got my detail type. I just scrolled down to Trust Accounts, Liabilities. So you want to make sure it looks that way as well. So one more thing I'd like to share on this particular spreadsheet that you may notice, if I imported this, it probably would have made a little bit of a mess and I would have had to do some cleanup because it's going to bring these in as just straight up Trust liabilities, but it's not booked underneath the trust account header or the parent trust account. So we always have a parent. We've already put that in with the chart of accounts. In the way these are looking right now, it wouldn't come through properly. So we need to book that in as well to make this spreadsheet correct. And I'll, I'll go do that cleanup and show it to you. But I just wanted to show you this because it brings up an important point. If you're using QuickBooks Online Advanced, definitely go through the steps of setting up your backup. There's an online backup inside of QuickBooks Online Advanced that comes with it. It's part of the program. You'd want to have that because you might want to undo what you did if you imported this list as is. If you don't have that, I highly recommend using Rewind. It's a little bit better than the one that comes with QuickBooks Online Advanced. So if you're using Plus or another version, definitely while you're doing this setup, Put that on your file and just back up your data. That way you won't have to reinvent the wheel, because the only other way you could fix this if you brought it in wrong and you brought in a giant list and it was wrong was you'd actually have to dial it all the way back to the very, very beginning. In other words, you'd have to purge it, and there is a way to purge it. I have a post about purging in my blog post that it's just a— you just put a line item into the browser It says purge and it will purge it. And if the file's within 90 days, you can purge and wipe out a file. If it's past that, you can do it as well, but it's a little bit more tricky. We have ways of doing that. But I just wanted to bring this to your attention because this piece is missing. It should say, you know, the trust— funds held in trust colon Aldridge comma William, and every single account should have that. So as I'm cleaning this up, I realized that I should probably show you a trick so that you can see how easy it is to add those words in front of all of the names. And it's Just a shortcut that you can use in Excel. Basically, you're going to put an equal sign. So you're going to do a whole other column, put the equal sign, and then put the words funds held in trust, which is the name of the liability account, and then put the quotations around it so Excel knows what you're doing, and then put an ampersand, and then the column that you're adding the words to. It's as simple as that. You hit enter and it does the formula. And now I can copy and paste these over, but I wanted to at least show you that this is a method that you can use to copy and move everything over. And I'm just going to copy the words here. I went too far. I'm just going to copy the column over here and bring this over now to my, my report. So I'm going to hit Edit, Copy, and I'm just going to replace these names here. Then I'm going to hit Paste Special. So I'm going to specially paste it so that it goes across with the, the way I want the names to be. Paste Special. I only want to paste over the words itself, which I don't know if you can see. I don't want the values to pop over. And now that matched over, and then I can remove— I don't really need to remove this column because I'm not going to be having it see it, but I can remove it if I want and just delete it. And, um, you know, clear it out. And that's a fast way of doing it so that way you don't have to like manually type. So now we're going to import this. So I'm just going to hit Save. This should work now. It should be very simple to bring in the file. Yes, I know I have old Excel, and I'm just going to close it down. And I just use the template so the template name isn't named after mine. So we're in the empty file, and I'm going to come over here to To the, um, gear. I'm going to come over to Import Data. Now the data should be clean enough to import. Chart of Accounts— this is going to be part of the Chart of Accounts. I'm going to hit Browse. And you would probably have wanted to save that with the customer name and all that for the customer one, because it's going to be different than, you know, what you have for the liability to pull the liability in. QuickBooks sample file open. Now let's see if this works. So I'm just going to hit Next, and it sees that I don't have an account number, which I didn't on this file. You could add numbers and renumber things nice and pretty if you're bringing in an older list and you wanted to give it some new name numbering. That's a great time to do it. A lot of law firms I work for, they just keep the— they keep the numbers that they've had in the past because they want to keep consistency in the file. They don't usually renumber them, but if you're looking for like that clean break, you can. And I'm just going to hit Next. Let's see how this goes. There's all the accounts. There's 31 of them. Let's import them. And it worked. Let's go check it out. We'll go over to the Accounting. And then let's look in the— here's the Funds Held in Trust, and there's all my numbers beautifully done. Boom, like that. So that's a few tips of the trade for to be able to import a list in super quick. And I hope that was really helpful in your setup and your journey along creating your QuickBooks Online file. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to reach out. I'd love for you to hit the subscribe button. I'm slowly inching my way up to 1,000 subscribers, which is really exciting for me. It's been a few years I've been doing this. But if you need help with any of your accounting needs, we're here to help you. If you're an accountant or bookkeeper and need some help and would like some direct help learning from me, feel free to Subscribe to the Accountant's Law Lab. Those links and ways to reach me are going to be inside the blog post itself and a lot more detail. So on that note, have a wonderful, wonderful week. Bye now. Bye.
