In this instructional video, Linda Artesani of Artesani Bookkeeping walks viewers through the end‑to‑end process of moving a law‑firm’s accounting data from QuickBooks Desktop (QBDT) to QuickBooks Online (QBO). She begins by advising on the appropriate QBO subscription tier (Essentials vs. Plus) for small and midsize firms, then outlines the preparatory steps using the new Moving Day Checklist, including creating a portable copy of the desktop file and cleaning up the books before export. The tutorial demonstrates how to export the portable file, initiate the online migration, and monitor the email confirmation from Intuit. After the file is imported, Linda shows how to verify that all transactions transferred correctly by running a trial‑balance and profit‑and‑loss report in QBO and comparing totals to the desktop version. She discusses special considerations for payroll, trust/IOLTA accounts, and memorized transactions, emphasizing the need to reactivate memorized items and to set up QBO Payroll Full Service if required. The video then details configuring company settings (legal name, EIN, industry, email) via the gear icon, and stresses the importance of reconciling bank and trust accounts, including handling opening‑balance equity entries that can appear when connecting bank feeds. Linda also warns about version compatibility—files older than 2018 must be upgraded before migration—and offers troubleshooting tips for common migration errors. Throughout, she encourages a “mirror‑image” approach (running both desktop and online side‑by‑side) for a smoother transition and points viewers to additional resources such as LeanLaw integration and her support channels.
Chapters
Hi, Linda Artesani, Artesani Bookkeeping. So I thought today I would do— we've already done the law firm one on starting a new company file, and I gave you a spreadsheet that you could import into QuickBooks and start fresh with a brand new, brand new set of chart of accounts. So that's a great start for someone maybe that worked in a law firm and that they're going to be moving from a partnership maybe, or maybe in a big firm and they're going on their own. They really have no records. And it's a great way to start your business doing it that way. Now, what if— let's just say for the next scenario that you've got a file on QuickBooks Desktop. You can see my desktop PC because I use a Mac. So it's my desktop PC. And maybe you've got your file on desktop, you've been using desktop for a long time, you're hearing all this chatter about automation, and not having to do the work and AI and what would work better for you to have your file out on the cloud, right? So the first thing you're going to do is you're going to sign up for QuickBooks Online.
My recommendation is to sign up for either QuickBooks Online Essentials.
If you don't need to have any classification requirements, budgeting, you just need the regular version of it. That's perfect to start with. Most of the clients that I work with are smaller firms and they use that file. If you have a need to have more features, then you might want to go to QuickBooks Plus. And the difference in pricing is just like $35 or $40 as opposed to $60. So it's a pretty significant amount of money if you want to keep your costs down. Then the next thing you do is you're going to sign up for your, your QuickBooks Online. And I'll put a link in the post for, for choosing the right file, right program. And now once you do that, now you've got your QuickBooks desktop file. Now you want to take that desktop file and move it into QuickBooks Online. So how do you do that? So I'm going to take you through the steps to do that.
So I'm going to show you how to export a law firm desktop file and import it into a QuickBooks Online file. So basically, you're going to take your, your desktop file. I recommend making a copy, a portable copy of the file, and then opening the portable copy up as your working file, the one that you're going to export. And then once you get ready to move, this is what shows up, and then you can start your export.
What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna log in as my user ID.
And then I'll put my password in. Okay, so my Moving Day Checklist. So they've got— this is a new feature. It wasn't here before. And it's giving you an idea of— because a lot of people were just willy-nilly moving their files over from desktop to online with a couple of clicks, and they weren't doing the homework that goes with it. So the biggest part of the homework, and this is one of the things I see a lot, I've had a few cleanup clients that Didn't do these steps. And then, in fact, I've got one right now. He did it last June, so his file was never correct when it migrated over. And now he's got a bit of a mess because he can't reconcile. He went to reconcile the year and it was reconciled in Desktop up to June, and it's not reconciled anymore going forward. So cleaning up the books, you can limit your export. I don't recommend this. Actual step here. I would actually say, you know, if you want to break the year down, I would consider it, except it's just— it just doesn't come out as clean. You get a lot of journal entries to get that to happen.
You know, keep—
you can either keep using desktop if you want to do an overlap. A lot of people like to do that overlap month where they'll run desktop and they'll run online to make sure that the numbers jive. That's always available to you.
It's a lot of work, but it's available to you. Payroll records are going to be a thing to really could be concerned about.
If you go with QuickBooks Online Full Service Payroll, they'll do the back work for you to tie it all in. Update your projects for job costing. Some of the job costing features are not in Desktop— that are in Desktop that are not in Online. So you need to be aware of that. Reactivate your memorized transactions. They will not— they'll migrate over, but they won't migrate over as activated.
So you have to do that.
And then, of course, you don't have to work in a template. So as long as you know that, you can hit Continue. And then I'm going to go find my company. So now it's going to move my file over to the online company file. Now I'll be getting an email in QuickBooks Online. And I will start that process of moving over to online, and then we can just make sure our numbers jive. I'm going to run a profit and loss accrual-based here. I'm going to run a profit and loss accrual-based in the online, and I'm going to make sure those numbers match up. And because I'm a ProAdvisor, we actually get a special little email that will tell us any little thing that's not going to migrate over. For example, you have other types of vendors in here. You've got vendors, customers, employees, and then you have the other type. You don't have that online— in online. So there's a few things. I can give you a link to the actual page in the help menu that will let you know what changes you need to watch out for. And I'll actually share with you on the other file what comes through and what didn't process over across. So I hope that's helpful to see it in action. It's pretty easy and straightforward.
So the first thing you're going to want to do in the QuickBooks Online file is set up this window. So this window is accessed— let me just move this out of the way here. This window is a window that is sometimes neglected by clients. And you just come over to the gear, go over to the account settings. You're going to move here, you put your icon in, put the name of your company in and legal name, whatever it is, if it's a different name than what you had. And you're going to put in your EIN number. If you're a partnership, maybe, or maybe you're a corporation, an S corp, a C corp, you want to put that in here. A lot of people skip that. Legal services, a few legal services in here under the types that you can choose. So you can just start to type legal and law firm and there's other ones that come in. I think there's a personal injury attorney, there's different ones in there. You just want to have that industry in place, your company email address, and then you can get into just setting up the settings. So now you've imported the file. And you're pulling it in, the first thing you want to do is go to your report. So here's my file, I'm going to go to reports. And I've done that on the desktop too. So I've done that on my computer, my PC, my computer here that I had my desktop file on. So I've already run the trial balance, all dates, accrual basis. I want to make sure that every single transaction that I pulled out of this file ends up in the new file. So we're going to come over to the trial balance. And if you, you know, you can't find it, you can just come right and select trial. Just do that. It's faster than searching. Now I want to change the default setting to all dates. And then I want to make sure it's on accrual, hit Run Report, and then scroll down to the bottom. And that is the totals that are on my QuickBooks Desktop file. So I know they match. So now I know I'm good there. One of the next things you need to do is if you have payroll, like I mentioned earlier, you want to sign up for QuickBooks Online Payroll Full Service or another service. But you want to do that because you want to take the numbers that were in your desktop file, especially if you're using Enhanced Desktop. A lot of people use it. It's a great program. If you're moving to the cloud and you're moving to QuickBooks Online, it's not the same thing. So you need to contact QuickBooks. If you want to contact me, I can get you set up. I've got a great team behind me with QuickBooks. I've had enough clients with it. They've really get— they've given me a really wonderful team to work with. And this way they can— you can have that navigated in and mapped out so that it's exactly right for the year. So we've already passed— you've probably run a few payrolls now because it's January. The next step you're going to want to do is reconcile your books. So wherever you left off reconciling in the desktop, now you want to reconcile your numbers in QuickBooks QuickBooks Online. So you want to make sure that's correct. You want to make sure you reconcile your bank account, your operating bank account. If you're trust— if you have trust accounting, IOLTA account, you want to reconcile the parent account as well as reconcile— you want to reconcile all the individual accounts. So you want to make sure that wherever you left off, you want a good firm cutoff, that everything is exact so you can go forward. So I reconcile all those figures monthly when the billing time comes. I want to make sure it matches. And most of the attorneys I work with They actually keep a side spreadsheet to make sure that it's correct, or some of them even keep the file in desktop, keep it separate just on the trust account in desktop. And then they met— we match it up. So you just want to make sure that the numbers are exact. When it comes to trust accounting, really important for compliance reasons that you have to make sure these numbers are correct. A lot of the files that come to me, the trust accounts are a mess and it's a lot of work to detangle them. It's a lot easier to keep them reconciled as you go along. So that's my other tip. Then once you get in here, you can start to navigate your way around. I can give you a link as well in the file to start to go through. And you can see here, never reconciled. These are all the things you want to reconcile here. So you can see that all of these need to be done. You know, they can go right through. In this file, I've got this ability because I'm in here as the accountant user, but this is normally not something that you have as a Regular Plus version user. This is the Plus account. So you can see it says accountant only view can see. That's because I have that version. You would not have that there, but you can see from me opening this tab up that there's all these transactions that are unreconciled that needs to be taken care of. So basically, that is it in a nutshell of navigating the file over, making sure it's accurate and correct. Really important. I can't stress that enough. And then once you know your numbers are correct, you should be good to go. forward once you've reconciled.
So that's really the final step to make sure you're where you left off in the new place.
And like I mentioned earlier, some people like to do a mirror image. They have to do this, they'll do the desktop, desktop file, they'll do the online file for a month and make sure it still jives, that there's no little things that are going wrong. It's not a bad practice. It is more work, but it's not a bad practice, especially until you get used to using online. It's a learning curve to online. Don't get frustrated. It is a little bit harder to work with when you first start out, and then you'll find out it's a breeze. You'll save time once you've hooked your bank feeds up. That would be my next recommendation. You're going to come over to the banking— actually, come to the dashboard. There's a section for banking and just connect your bank accounts. That's going to help you get your connection started. So it's going to make the automation piece start to happen. And then I've got some blogs in here as well that will help you to how I can go through and just pull transactions in. But you don't want to pull in transactions Prior to the reconciliation date, they're probably going to pull in when you connect the bank feed. The bank feed generally pulls in 90 days. So you're just going to want to exclude those transactions that you pulled in that are not necessary. And also make sure you exclude— when you connect a bank feed for the first time, part of the feed is it brings in the balance at the time from 90 days ago. And it reconciles it. So you need to remove that transaction. It's easily found by going into your Accounting, your chart of accounts, and look for the opening balance equity account. That shouldn't have nothing in it. It should be a zero balance. If you're finding that that has a balance to it, then there's something wrong and you need to fix it. Like, this is $8,000 in it. So we know that there's something wrong in this account that needs to be taken out and removed. It shouldn't be there. And a lot of times it comes from that bank feed connection for the first time. So I'll be doing some more videos as I go along here, working through different aspects. We'll get into LeanLaw, connecting LeanLaw, and we'll get into more depth. And as we go forward, but I just wanted to show how you move a desktop file to QuickBooks Online for a law firm and how that can be helpful to just the little things you need to do to tie it together. And I will attach in this file the page that will give you QuickBooks Desktop 2018. You'll need that to connect and make the conversion. You can't convert an older desktop file. A lot of people get stuck in the older versions and they don't upgrade. You'll need to upgrade your file to do that. Of course, we're here to help if you need any help with this kind of work, especially if your file is really old. I had somebody the other day that was using 2008 QuickBooks, so it's old, you know, 11 years old now, and you just can't take a 2008 file and move it into 2018. There's just too many changes as it goes along. So you have to really watch how you have to step it up to make sure the file stays stable with the desktop file. So I hope that's helpful. Again, if you have any questions, comments, if you need to reach out to me, you can find me on Facebook, all the different ways. I'm out here to help. So thank you so much. Bye now.
