Moving Between Two QuickBooks Online Companies
Why a country or home-currency change forces a brand-new QuickBooks Online company, what it takes to move your lists and history into it, how the two accountant invitations work, and the one irreversible step to get right.
The Setting You Cannot Change
Most QuickBooks Online settings can be adjusted whenever you like. A few cannot, and they are decided the moment the company is created:
- The country edition -- which regional version of QuickBooks Online the company runs
- The home currency -- the base currency every report is expressed in
Neither has a switch. Once the company is set up, that is what it is.
This trips up more businesses than you would expect, and almost never through carelessness at the time. A company gets set up quickly, years ago, by whoever was available, for a business that looked different then. Then the business relocates, or incorporates elsewhere, or starts earning in a different currency, and the configuration that was fine in year one is now wrong in a way that cannot be corrected in place.
Why the Obvious Fix Does Not Work
The instinctive response is to look for the setting. There isn't one. The second instinct is to assume multi-currency solves it -- it does not. Turning on multi-currency lets you transact in other currencies; it does not change the home currency your books are denominated in, and enabling it is itself irreversible.
So the only route is a new QuickBooks Online company with the correct country and currency. That part takes minutes.
The problem is what the new company contains: nothing. Every customer, vendor, item, account and every transaction you have ever recorded is in the old company, and the new one starts empty. For a business six months old that is an afternoon of data entry. For one with years of history, it is not a realistic option at all.
The Other Reasons People End Up Here
The currency and country case is the most common, but the same shape of problem shows up elsewhere:
- Consolidation. Two QuickBooks Online companies that need to become one, usually after an acquisition or after running divisions separately for a while.
- A fresh subscription. A restructured business, or a company that has accumulated years of settings and stale data nobody wants to carry forward.
- A company created in error. Work started in the wrong place and now has to be brought into the right one.
In every case the destination exists first and is empty, and the history has to be brought to it.
How Access Works: Two Invitations
Because both companies live in the cloud, there is no file to export, send, or upload anywhere. What is needed instead is accountant access to each company, added through:
Settings → Manage users → Accounting firms → Invite firm
Two details matter here. First, it has to be an accountant invitation, not a standard team-member invite -- the ordinary user role does not carry the access this work needs. Second, it is two separate invitations, one per company, and they do different jobs:
- The source company (the one you are migrating from) is read-only. Nothing in it is changed, moved or deleted. It is still there, intact, when the migration is finished.
- The destination company (the one you are migrating to) is written to.
No password is ever shared, and access can be revoked on either company at any time.
The single most common hold-up on this kind of work is being invited to the destination only. Without access to the source, there is nothing to read.
The Irreversible Step
Loading data into the destination overwrites whatever is already there. That company should be fresh and empty.
This is the one step worth being careful about, because it is not reversible on your side. If someone has already entered a few weeks of invoices into the new company, or set up opening balances by hand, that work will be gone. The right move in that situation is to create another new company and use it as the destination instead -- companies are cheap, and re-entering a fortnight of invoices is a far smaller problem than discovering it disappeared.
If you are not certain whether the company you have in mind counts as empty, resolve that before the destination invitation goes out rather than after. The source company is never at risk either way.
What Actually Moves
Lists move in full -- the whole structure the books are built on: chart of accounts, customers, vendors, employees, items, classes, departments or locations, terms, payment methods, tax agencies, tax codes and tax rates, the currencies in use, and budgets.
Transactions move for an agreed date range: invoices, bills, payments, bill payments, journal entries, estimates, sales receipts, credit memos, refund receipts, purchases, purchase orders, deposits, transfers and time activities.
Because the two companies are entirely separate systems, nothing is literally copied. Every record is created new in the destination, and every internal reference is re-pointed at the destination's own version of the record it refers to. Lists are loaded before the transactions that depend on them, so the destination stays internally consistent at every stage rather than only at the end.
What does not move: attachments, audit-log history, bank-feed connections, recurring templates and custom report layouts. Payroll history, filings and reconciliations sit outside the scope. Bank feeds and recurring templates get re-established directly in the destination once you are working in it -- expected, not a fault.
E-Tech Corporation publishes the engineering detail of how this is carried out and reconciled in its write-up on migrating between QuickBooks Online companies.
Do the Cleanup First, Not After
A migration moves what is there. It does not re-code, correct or tidy anything on the way through, which means any error in the source arrives intact in the destination.
That makes the run-up the right moment to review your P&L and balance sheet, clear out list entries you know are junk, and resolve anything that already looks wrong. Meeting the same discrepancy again in a brand-new company -- after you have gone to the trouble of moving -- is a genuinely demoralising way to discover it.
Checking the Result
Compare the destination against the source before you start working in it: Trial Balance, Balance Sheet, Profit & Loss across the migrated range, and the A/R and A/P aging summaries. Keep the source company accessible until you have done this. It costs nothing to leave it available for one more billing cycle, and it is the only reference you have if a number looks off.