FreshBooks to QuickBooks Converter: Migrate FreshBooks CSV Exports to QBO

Export from FreshBooks by data type, then split the exports two ways. Cash movement (expenses and payments collected) converts to a .qbo file and goes in through Bank Feeds. Lists (clients, vendors, chart of accounts, items) go in through QuickBooks' own Import Data screens. Doing the lists first saves rework, because transactions land against accounts that already exist.

Open a report and choose More Actions, then Export for Excel, which downloads a CSV despite the name. Lists have their own direct CSV downloads under your account settings: chart of accounts, clients, vendors, expenses, items and services. Estimates and proposals are the exception. FreshBooks only supplies those as CSV if you email Support with a date range.

Yes, and for a typical small business you can do it yourself. FreshBooks gives you clean CSV out of every report, and a converter turns the transaction rows into a QuickBooks Web Connect (.qbo) file that both QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop accept. What no tool can do is carry over things QuickBooks has no home for, like FreshBooks proposals and time tracking history.

Not as a two way sync you would want to migrate on. There is no first party FreshBooks connector that keeps a QuickBooks company file in step, and Intuit publishes no official FreshBooks migration tool. Third party conversion services and CSV based imports are how the route actually gets done, which is why the export quality above matters so much.

Export the Expense Report and the Payments Collected report as CSV, upload each to the converter at the top of this page, and import the resulting .qbo files through the bank upload. In QuickBooks Online that is All apps, then Accounting, then Bank transactions, then Link account, then Upload from file. Some accounts still show the older Transactions, then Bank transactions path, and both lead to the same upload screen.

No. QuickBooks Desktop cannot import bank or credit card transactions from a CSV in any version, Enterprise included. The Import Excel and CSV Toolkit handles four list types only: customers, vendors, items and the chart of accounts. For transactions the only supported routes are a .qbo Web Connect file or IIF, and IIF posts straight to the ledger with no undo.

A .qbo import protects itself. Every OFX or .qbo transaction carries a FITID that is unique within the account, and QuickBooks skips any FITID it has already seen. The catch worth knowing: QuickBooks remembers those IDs even after you delete the transaction, so re-importing to restore a deleted row will not work. Plain CSV rows carry no identifier at all.

As far back as FreshBooks holds it, provided you convert to .qbo first. The 1,000 transaction and 350 KB limits that cap a QuickBooks Online CSV upload are the reason people assume history is off the table. Converting sidesteps the row cap, and where a file is genuinely enormous you split it by date range and import in sequence.

MM/DD/YYYY for a US QuickBooks company file. This is a real trap, because the Intuit help article that ranks best for CSV formatting is the global edition and it recommends DD/MM/YYYY. Follow that on a US file and every day from the 1st to the 12th silently lands in the wrong month. Our converter normalizes dates instead of trusting the source file.

Clients, vendors, items and the chart of accounts import cleanly through QuickBooks' own Import Data screens, on Online and Desktop alike. Invoices are the awkward one. Most businesses import only the invoices still open at cutover and let paid invoices stay in FreshBooks as history, since the cash side of those already arrives with your converted transactions.

Usually not. Conversion houses earn their fee on genuinely hard files: multi currency, several years of inventory, or a file that has to survive an audit line by line. A single entity service business leaving FreshBooks is not that. If you can export the reports and pick a cutover date, the CSV route gets you there for a fraction of the cost.

Reconcile every account in FreshBooks through your cutover date, then stop entering new transactions in FreshBooks. Build the chart of accounts in QuickBooks first and set up bank rules before a single transaction lands, because rules only apply going forward. Then export, convert and import in that order. Keep the FreshBooks account readable for at least a full tax cycle.

Plus or higher. FreshBooks states that accounting reports like the General Ledger are only available on Plus, Premium and Select plans, so a Lite subscriber has no ledger to export. On Lite you migrate from the Expense Report and Payments Collected instead, which still covers the cash movement a .qbo file needs, then rebuild opening balances by hand.

The conversion itself is the small line. Three conversions run with no account and no card, and a free signup gives unlimited conversions capped at 100 transactions per file with watermarked output, which is enough to test the shape of your data. Paid plans start at $49 per month, or $24 per month billed yearly, for 100 clean conversions a month.

Mostly US service businesses that outgrew invoicing-first software. The usual triggers are hiring staff and needing real payroll, taking on inventory, adding a second entity, or an accountant who wants the file in QuickBooks so it matches every other client. FreshBooks is strong at getting invoices paid; the pressure to move almost always comes from the accounting side rather than the billing side.

Four failures cover most of the pain. Importing transactions before the chart of accounts exists, so everything piles into Uncategorized. Double counting revenue by importing invoices and the deposits that paid them. Mixing a credit card export into a bank account, where the sign convention is reversed and every purchase reads as money in. And an overlap at the cutover date, where the last week of FreshBooks and the first week of QuickBooks both hold the same transactions.

Online, for almost everyone leaving FreshBooks. Intuit stopped selling new Pro, Premier and Mac Plus licences in September 2024, 2024 is the final non-Enterprise release, and support for it ends September 30, 2027. Enterprise is still sold and supported. Unless you have a specific Desktop requirement such as advanced inventory or job costing, landing in QuickBooks Online avoids a second migration in a couple of years.

Use the first day of a month, and preferably the first day of a quarter or fiscal year. A mid month cutover means every report for that month has to be stitched from two systems, which is exactly the reconciliation you are trying to avoid. Reconcile FreshBooks through the day before, then treat that date as a hard line: nothing new gets entered in FreshBooks after it.

No. FreshBooks report exports come out with their own headers, and the converter reads them automatically rather than asking you to line up a template first. That matters here because FreshBooks does not emit one uniform transaction file. The Expense Report and Payments Collected report have different column sets, and both convert without you editing either one.

The converter takes one file per run, so you upload the expense export, convert it, then repeat for payments collected and any card accounts. That is normally three to five runs for a full migration, not dozens. Convert and import one account at a time anyway. It keeps each .qbo file matched to the QuickBooks account it belongs in, which is where mismatched imports usually go wrong.

They do not come across, and no converter changes that. QuickBooks Online has its own time and project tools but there is no import path from FreshBooks for either, and proposals have no QuickBooks equivalent at all. Bill any unbilled time out of FreshBooks before the cutover so it turns into an invoice, which does have somewhere to land.

Run three comparisons on the cutover date. Bank balance in QuickBooks against the real bank statement. Profit and loss for a closed month in QuickBooks against the same month in FreshBooks. And total expenses for the migrated period against your FreshBooks Expense Report. If revenue reads high, the usual culprit is invoices imported alongside the deposits that already paid them.

Upload the FreshBooks transaction CSV at the top of this page. The converter reads the columns, normalizes the dates to the US format QuickBooks expects, assigns a FITID to every row so QuickBooks can dedupe on re-import, and returns a .qbo file ready for Bank Feeds. Credit card exports convert the same way, they just belong in a credit card account rather than a bank account.