Will our open sales orders and POs come over with the real lines?

What is actually happening

Sales orders, purchase orders and estimates are non-posting documents. They record a promise, not a sale or a purchase, so they touch no account in the general ledger. That is exactly why they go missing. The trial balance, the balance sheet, the AR and AP agings and the inventory valuation all tie whether an open order came over or not. No financial check can see one that is gone.

They are also harder to carry than they look. An order is rarely untouched: some lines have shipped and been invoiced, some have partly shipped, some were closed by hand. In your current file, the invoice that ships a line is linked to the order and reduces what is open on it. Links between transactions do not carry into a new company file, so the new file has to be given, directly, what is still open on every order.

And QuickBooks' own markings can mislead. An order's flags can disagree with what its open-order reports show, and in our experience the default view of Open Sales Orders by Customer leaves some partly invoiced orders out of its summary until the Detail Level is set to All. The open-order reports, read in full, are the truth your team works from, and they are the yardstick any new file should be measured against.

What people try first, and what it costs them

Starting over means re-keying open orders by hand, often hundreds of them, while the business keeps shipping against them. Mistakes surface as wrong shipments and missed receipts.

A summary conversion, where it carries open orders at all, brings each one over as a dollar total with a placeholder line in place of the items. Nobody can pick, receive or invoice against a placeholder line. Without the real items, the quantities on order disappear from purchasing and production planning, and invoicing the order means rebuilding its items and their sales tax by hand.

Condense keeps open orders in the file, because anything open stays. That is part of why a condensed file is rarely much smaller. It is also error-prone, and on an old file it fails or stalls again and again.

Switching platforms raises the same question in a new system: the orders have to come over line by line, or be re-keyed.

What a line-by-line rebuild does instead

Every open sales order, purchase order and estimate comes over with its real lines: the items, quantities, rates, descriptions, subtotals and line order, the way it prints in your file. Lines your file shows as closed stay closed. Closed orders stay in the retired file unless you ask for that history too.

What counts as open is not taken from a flag. It is taken from your file's own reports: Open Sales Orders by Customer, Open Sales Orders by Item, Open Purchase Orders and the estimates report, each with every row included. Those reports are pulled from both files and compared order by order, on the order number and the open balance. Then every order is checked line by line for extra lines, lines carried short, rate changes and the order's open balance.

That comparison runs at every load, not once. Your team keeps shipping in the old file until cutover: invoices close lines, new orders arrive, old ones are cancelled. Each load brings the new file back to what your reports show on that day.

On the scorecard you see the open-orders tier at $0.00, or each exception named. On Monday morning, purchasing and production see the same open quantities on the same items they saw on Friday.