It is the first thing almost everybody asks us, and usually the only thing standing between them and a decision: “if I move, does my history come with me?” Here is the honest answer, including the parts that do not.
.qbw file — not us, not Xero, not Sage, and not QuickBooks Online.
Every migration on the market, Intuit’s own included, works by exporting data
out of QuickBooks first. What separates them is how much of that export the new
software can actually make sense of.
Why nobody opens a .qbw
Your QuickBooks books live in a company file with a .qbw extension. It is
a proprietary format that Intuit has never published a specification for. There is no
library to read it, no documented schema, and no legal route to reverse-engineer one.
The clearest proof of this is Intuit’s own behaviour. When Intuit moves a customer from QuickBooks Desktop to QuickBooks Online — its own product, its own format, its own engineers — the process still begins with an export and a conversion, and it still drops data along the way. If the company that wrote the format has to export, so does everyone else.
So when a competitor’s marketing implies they will “just open your QuickBooks file,” what they mean is that they will import an export. It is worth knowing that before you judge anyone’s migration promises, ours included.
What actually comes across
This is the part most comparison articles get vague about, so here it is as a list rather than an adjective.
| What | What survives the move |
|---|---|
| Chart of accounts | Account numbers, names, types, descriptions, and the parent/child structure — not flattened into a single list |
| Customers & vendors | Names and contact details, including ones that only ever existed inside invoice or bill records |
| Invoices | Numbers, dates, line items, income-account allocations and totals — so A/R aging works from day one |
| Bills | Numbers, dates, line items, expense-account allocations and totals, giving you real A/P aging |
| Payments | Customer payments and bill payments, matched back to the invoice or bill they settled |
| Item List | Every QuickBooks item type: service, inventory, non-inventory, group, discount percentage and inventory assembly |
| Class List | The full list including parent/sub-class hierarchy, landing on our built-in Class tracking dimension |
| Class & item tags on lines | Applied to each journal line as it imports, so your class-based P&L still reports the way it did |
That last row is the one that matters more than people expect. Plenty of tools will take a chart of accounts. Far fewer re-apply your classes and items to individual transaction lines, and without that you land with years of history that reports as one undifferentiated blob and has to be re-classified by hand.
What does not come across
Any vendor claiming a completely lossless migration is selling you something. These are the real gaps, and you should hear them from us rather than discover them in week three:
- Payroll tax history. Locked to QuickBooks’ payroll engine. If you are mid-year, plan to finish the year on your existing payroll records.
- Document attachments. Receipts and files stapled to transactions live in QuickBooks’ attachment store, not in any export.
- Reconciliation history. Your reconciled balances come over as balances; the record of which statement cleared which line does not.
- The audit trail. QuickBooks’ internal change log is not exportable. Ours starts the day you import.
- Memorized reports and custom form templates. These are QuickBooks-specific objects. They have to be rebuilt — usually a short job, and usually a chance to drop the ones nobody ran.
None of these are unique to us. Every one of them is also lost when Intuit converts you to QuickBooks Online; we have written up Intuit’s own published exclusion list separately, and it is longer than this one.
What the move actually looks like
- Export the lists. In QuickBooks: File › Utilities › Export › Lists to IIF Files. Tick Accounts, Customers, Vendors, Item List and Class List.
- Export the transactions. Run a Transaction Detail report over your full date range, add the Class and Item columns via Customize Report, and export to CSV or Excel.
- Drop the files in. The import wizard takes them in phases — lists first, so classes and items exist before the transactions that reference them arrive.
- Check it before you commit. Do a trial run into a test company first, compare a couple of reports against QuickBooks, then delete the test and do it for real. If something lands in the wrong place, the Resolve Import Suspense tool repoints every parked entry in one pass, and any import batch can be rolled back whole.
The honest summary
You will not get a byte-perfect clone of your QuickBooks file, from us or from anybody else, because the format that would make that possible has never been opened. What you can get is your accounts, your contacts, your open and closed A/R and A/P, your items, your classes, and your transaction history as far back as it goes — with the class and item tags still attached so your reports keep working.
For most businesses that is the difference between a migration and a fresh start. And the only genuinely urgent piece is the one at the top of this page: if QuickBooks still opens on your machine, take the export now.
Try the import before you commit to anything
Take your QuickBooks export, install BizBooks Pro, and run it into a test company. Thirty days, all features, no credit card. If the import does not do what this page says it does, you have lost an afternoon and learned something useful.
Start your free trialStuck with a file that no longer opens, or a history that goes back decades? Tell us what you are working with — we would rather look at your actual situation than guess.
Questions we get asked before every migration
Can BizBooks Pro open my QuickBooks .qbw file directly?
No, and neither can any other accounting product. The .qbw company file is a proprietary format Intuit has never published. Even Intuit’s own migration path from QuickBooks Desktop to QuickBooks Online starts by exporting your data rather than by opening the file. You run an export inside QuickBooks and BizBooks Pro imports what comes out — IIF, CSV, Excel, QIF, QFX or QBO.
What actually transfers when I leave QuickBooks Desktop?
Your chart of accounts with numbers, types and parent/child structure; customers and vendors; open and historical invoices and bills with their line items and account allocations; customer payments and bill payments matched back to what they paid; your Item List including inventory, service, group and assembly items; and your Class List with its hierarchy. Classes and items are applied to transaction lines as they import, so your reports still slice the way they used to.
What does not come over?
Payroll tax history, document attachments, reconciliation history, the audit trail, memorized report definitions and custom form templates. These are either locked inside the .qbw or are QuickBooks-specific constructs with no equivalent anywhere else. Any vendor who tells you a migration is completely lossless is not being straight with you.
How far back can I bring my history?
As far back as your file goes. One BizBooks Pro customer moved a QuickBooks file with transactions dating to 1997. There is no cut-off date on the import — the practical limit is how much history you asked QuickBooks to include in the export report.
My QuickBooks is an old version. Does the export still work?
QuickBooks Desktop Pro, Premier, Mac and Enterprise from the 2013 releases onward, and in most cases older, export IIF in a format that has barely changed in twenty years. The thing that actually expires is your ability to open QuickBooks at all: the 2023 releases lost support on 31 May 2026 and 2024 loses it on 30 September 2027. Take the export while your copy still opens.