Is a summary conversion enough, or do we need a full rebuild?

What is actually happening

A summary conversion builds a new company file from your lists and your balances on a start date. Customers, vendors, items and accounts come over. The trial balance on the start date comes over as opening entries. Sometimes open invoices and bills come over as individual totals, so the aging has something to age. Open sales orders and purchase orders, where they are carried at all, arrive as a dollar total with a placeholder line in place of the items. Inventory arrives as opening quantities.

The transactions do not come over. Completed invoices, bills, payments, builds and transfers stay in the old file. One written quote we hold says it plainly: completed invoices, builds and closed records cannot be migrated.

That is why the new file feels clean, and why its reports are thin. Every report in QuickBooks is built from transactions. A file whose transactions begin on the conversion date has sales by item, sales by customer, purchase history and inventory history that begin on the conversion date too. Each item's cost starts from a single opening figure.

These services typically cost $8,000 to $15,000, with extras for things such as pending builds. That same quote allowed about six weeks.

What people try first, and what it costs them

The summary conversion is usually what people try first, and the gaps show up in ordinary questions. A customer asks what they ordered last spring, and the answer is in the old file. Purchasing asks how many of a part sold last year, and the new file holds a few weeks of sales. Sales by rep, item profitability and the year-over-year comparison all start at the conversion date. Open orders cannot be picked or received against a placeholder line, so someone re-keys them. Every lookup before the start date means opening the old file.

Open invoices carry a quieter risk. If an old invoice comes over at its original amount, and the payments against it come over unapplied, the customer's balance can look right while the aging shows the wrong invoice open.

Condense is meant to keep detail after a date and summarize before it, inside the same file. It is error-prone and on an old file fails or stalls again and again. When it finishes, item and reconciliation reports for the earlier period go blank, the file is rarely much smaller, and the only way back is the archive copy, which is the old file again.

Starting over by hand is a summary conversion done by your own staff. Switching platforms leaves the QuickBooks history behind in the same way, at a higher price.

What a line-by-line rebuild does instead

Both approaches pick a start date. The difference is what happens after it. A rebuild opens the new file at your cutover date, usually the first day of your last fiscal year, and then enters every transaction from that date forward, line by line: every invoice, bill, payment, build, transfer and journal entry. Open orders come over with their real items, quantities and rates. Inventory comes over by item and by site, with average cost. Payments are applied to the same invoices they paid in your file, so each invoice's open balance is its true remaining balance, not its original amount.

Everything before the cutover stays in the retired file, read-only, just as it would after a summary conversion. The difference is that the new file's reports run from the cutover with full detail, so this year against last year works on day one.

The two files are then compared at every tier, invoice by invoice as well as in total, and you see that scorecard before the final payment.

The honest comparison on price: a rebuild runs $9,500 to $14,000 for a Standard file, $14,000 to $22,000 with inventory and assemblies, and $22,000 and up for complex Enterprise files. That overlaps the summary range at the low end and runs above it for larger files. It takes four to twelve weeks.