If your business has outgrown QuickBooks, you already know the signs: reporting that takes too long, multi-entity workarounds that fail at month-end, or an audit trail that makes your accountant nervous. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is the natural next step for mid-market companies that need enterprise-grade financials without enterprise-grade complexity. But the migration decision often stalls on a single question: “What happens to all our data?” The good news: Microsoft has invested in making this transition more structured than most people expect. The nuance lies in the preparation.
Here is what a well-run QuickBooks-to-Business Central migration looks like.
Microsoft has built in QuickBooks to Business Central migration tools
Business Central SaaS ships with built-in connectors for both major QuickBooks variants, and it matters to understand which one applies to you before you do anything else.
| QuickBooks Version |
Migration Approach |
| QuickBooks Desktop (on-premises) |
Download and run Microsoft’s Data Exporter tool; it connects to your QB Desktop instance and packages data into a zip file for import. |
| QuickBooks Online (SaaS) |
Use the Assisted Setup wizard directly inside Business Central, no external tooling required. |
Because Microsoft provides these natively, there is less custom scripting, fewer third-party dependencies, and a cleaner audit trail from day one. That said, the tools handle the mechanics of migration. The strategy still requires human judgment.
Prepare your financial structure for a Business Central migration
This is where most migrations succeed or struggle. Technical execution is repeatable. Chart of accounts decisions, account mapping, and tax setup require deliberate choices that will shape your financials for years.
In Business Central, the general ledger requires an account number for each account. Before you run anything, confirm that all your QuickBooks accounts have assigned numbers. More importantly, document how each QuickBooks account maps to your target BC chart of accounts. This is a translation layer between two different data models, and it deserves more than a quick afternoon of work.
The posting groups you need to define before migration are your revenue accounts for customer-facing transactions, your purchase and COGS accounts for vendor-side activity, and your adjustment accounts for manual GL entries and reclassifications.
One step most teams skip until it causes a problem: if your QuickBooks transactions include tax amounts, Business Central requires corresponding tax jurisdiction accounts before those transactions can be posted. This doesn’t break the import, but it will prevent you from posting afterward. Set up your tax accounts as part of pre-migration configuration, not as an afterthought you handle on go-live day.
What data migrates from QuickBooks to Business Central (And what does not)
Business Central’s migration tools cover the core financial and operational data set that most mid-market businesses need. Here are what transfers.
| Data category |
What is included |
| Master data |
Customers, vendors, and items: your core business relationships and inventory catalog |
| Chart of accounts |
Your full GL account structure (account numbers must be pre-assigned in QuickBooks) |
| Opening balances |
Beginning balance transactions for the General Ledger, establishing your financial baseline in BC |
| Inventory quantities |
On-hand quantities for inventory items at the point of migration |
| Open transactions |
Outstanding customer invoices, vendor invoices, credit memos, and payments (the live AR/AP picture) |
A few things worth noting:
- Historically closed transactions do not migrate in detail. You get opening balances as a summary entry, not line-by-line history. If you need historical transaction detail accessible in BC, that is a separate project, typically involving a data warehouse or reporting layer.
- Custom fields and QuickBooks-specific configurations do not transfer. Anything specific to QuickBooks’s data model needs to be re-built or re-thought within BC’s structure.
Avoid common QuickBooks to Business Central migration mistakes
Migration tools handle data movement. They don’t handle business process redesign. The biggest risk in a QuickBooks-to-BC migration is lifting and shifting flawed processes into a more powerful system, only to wonder why you are not getting value from it.
A few questions worth asking before you start:
- Which of our current closing processes are we tolerating rather than actually endorsing?
- Are our QuickBooks account categories still reflecting how the business actually operates?
- What reporting and workflows do we wish QuickBooks could do that BC can now enable?
Migration is a forcing function. The teams that get the most out of Business Central are those that treat it as an opportunity to revisit their financial architecture, rather than simply moving data from one system to another.
QuickBooks to Business Central pre-migration checklist for finance teams:
- All QuickBooks GL accounts have account numbers assigned.
- Account mapping from QuickBooks to the BC chart of accounts is documented and approved.
- Tax jurisdiction accounts are configured in Business Central.
- Go-live date is aligned with a clean financial period break (ideally, fiscal year-end or quarter-end).
- A reconciliation plan is in place to validate GL opening balances post-migration.
- For QuickBooks Desktop: the Microsoft Data Exporter tool is downloaded and tested.
Migration with a business outcome in mind
Choosing Business Central means embracing broader capability, better reporting, stronger controls, and integration with workflows across your enterprise. But the migration is the bridge between what was and what could be. It is about preserving continuity while enabling better decisions, smoother operations, and more strategic thinking.
If you are in the early stages of evaluating this move, or already in planning and want a second set of eyes on your approach, we will be happy to walk through what this looks like for your specific environment. Let us talk.
