I’ve inherited a Sage 50c accounting system with 15 years of data in, and am thinking of switching to QF. I don’t like 50c - it’s cumbersome, it’s expensive, it requires an upgrade from the Windows 7 machine it’s running on and it’s painfully slow when working remotely. I already use QF for three other businesses and know and like it! I migrated two of those businesses from TAS Books (bought and run down by Sage when MTD arrived) and did it myself with data exports from TAS and into QF with csv files.
I’m half way through the financial year. It’s not a massive business - approx 4000 transactions per year, 450 sales ledger accounts and 320 purchase ledger accounts. The only area of any complexity is that we do have foreign currency transactions.
Has anyone migrated from 50c?
Any feedback on how difficult it was or any hints and tips?
Has anyone used MoveMyBooks - their website doesn’t offer QF as a destination but they do export from 50c so I wondered if their 50c output might then be usable in importing into QF. If not MMB then anything similar?
What solution did you come up with for maintaining old data, particularly to comply with the ‘6 years of records’ rules?
While I can’t speak from experience of this first-hand, we can offer general advice.
If you’re able to export data as CSV, then this could certainly be imported into QuickFile. However, it’s often easier to export a trial balance and import this, rather than importing historic transactions and invoices. This would put you in the right position to start with QuickFile.
Do you have any copies of the data at all? The important thing would be with old data, is if HMRC ever asked you to prove any data, could you?
Ideally I’d like to bring in prior year transactions (and those of this year so far if I don’t wait for the beginning of the next financial year) so that users can view past year transactions and make comparisons from last year to this. My experience is that being able to look at variances from last year to this is useful and it’s likely that you might need to look at transactions for last year to resolve issues, debt chase, etc - but that looking at transactions in detail further back than prior year is much less likely.
The point about old data is a good one. I think to be able to view prior years in Sage 50c I’d have to keep paying the hefty annual subscription which I’m not keen on! Hence wondering if anyone had any alternative suggestions.
I’m still keen to hear of any experiences in moving from Sage 50c if there are any QF users out there who’ve made that move?
