QuickBooks Desktop to Xero: What Transfers and What Does Not

There is no button inside Xero that eats a .QBW or a .QBB.

Xero's documented route for a QuickBooks file goes outside the product entirely. Its partner-facing migration article names a third party, Jet Convert, and sends you to that company's site even to find out whether your edition is supported. The alternative is Xero's own CSV import screens, which you drive yourself. Both routes are scoped, and the three things people expect to find on the other side — payroll history, the reconciliations, the attached documents — sit outside every scope, in different ways and for different reasons.

Verified against Intuit, Xero, Jet Convert and Gusto documentation on 27 September 2026, at the pages linked beside each claim. One page is deliberately absent: Xero Central's Conversion Toolbox article, which lists the ledger systems Xero's in-house conversion tool reads, redirects anonymous readers to a login screen, and nothing below depends on that list. All four vendors revise these pages without notice; the five Intuit articles used here were updated between 3 and 5 August 2026.

The two routes out of a Desktop file, and what each one is scoped to

Xero Central's partner-facing article Migrate your client to Xero from QuickBooks is short, and the short version is the operative one:

Xero's migration partner, Jet Convert, moves your client's data from QuickBooks to Xero.

The same page sets three expectations worth writing down before anyone quotes you a timeline. Jet Convert sets up Xero "using the financial information from Quickbooks, including transactions for the current and previous fiscal year." The migration and setup "can take up to five business days but typically happens faster than that." And if you have questions about the converted data, contact Jet Convert "within seven days of conversion." That last window catches people, because the checklist and the trial balance comparison land at the end of the job.

The same page also splits the preparation work in a way that decides whether you pay twice: you complete "all the essential file preparation tasks" before conversion, while "any optional file preparation tasks can be completed before or after conversion."

Jet Convert's own Desktop data preparation page carries the field-level detail. It opens with what the service accepts:

WE CAN CONVERT: USA QuickBooks desktop including Pro, Premier, Accountants version or Enterprise. USA QuickBooks Macintosh version if you export to a .QBB file.

Then, three lines long:

WE DO NOT CONVERT: Payroll. Multi-currency files. Advanced (tracked) inventory.

Read that list next to the equivalent one on Jet Convert's QuickBooks Online page and the difference is hard to miss. The Online page names eight exclusions rather than three, adding QBO Self Employed, Locations, Projects, PDF Attachments and Linked Transactions. I could not find a Desktop-specific statement about attachments or linked transactions on either page, and a shorter list is not a promise. Ask Jet Convert about both before you pick a package.

The package tiers on Jet Convert's US pricing page show how much history is a purchase decision rather than a technical one. Read both figures in each tier, because the first is struck through. Standard lists $250 against a payable $0 — "fully subsidised by Xero" — covering current plus previous fiscal year transactions, chart of accounts, contacts, items and jobs/classes. Accelerate shows $720 struck through against $470 "with Xero's subsidy", adds two more years for a total of current plus three previous fiscal years, and includes the bank account types and monthly comparatives that cost extra on Standard. Prices on that page are USD.

The add-ons are where a cheap conversion stops being cheap. Additional years of transactional data run $150 per year, capped at two extra years on Standard and eleven on Accelerate. Bank account mapping is $75 on Standard. Monthly comparatives, another $75. Changing your chart of accounts as part of the conversion, $150. Jobs on their own, $300; classes on their own, $300.

Both preparation pages also mention a Fresh Start package for which "no data preparation is required", and the packages page offers "an option for balances only." Balances only is a real choice, and for a business whose old file is a mess it is sometimes the honest one. It is also the version where everything below matters most, because almost nothing but the closing position arrives.

The second route is to do it yourself through Xero's import screens. That path has no page limit on history, but it has field rules, and those come later on.

Payroll history: the number Xero wants is not the number QuickBooks exports

Two facts stack up here, and people usually know only the first. The conversion does not carry payroll — both Jet Convert preparation pages say so in the same words.

The second is that in the US there is no Xero payroll ledger for that history to land in. Xero Central's Options to manage your payroll with Xero says Xero "integrates with specialist payroll apps" and points at the Xero App Store, and Xero's US payroll page describes the product as "Xero Payroll, powered by Gusto." So the receiving system for your payroll history is Gusto's setup flow, not a Xero import template.

Gusto's Enter previous payrolls during account setup article states the general requirement first — "Quarter-to-date (QTD) summaries for each past quarter this year" plus "Individual paystubs for the current quarter", gathered for dismissed employees as well as active ones — and then names the specific paystub each starting quarter hangs on:

Read the table against the requirement above it: each row names one paystub, but the gather list asks for every past quarter in the year, so an October cutover needs Q1 and Q2 as well as Q3.

Dismissed employees is the phrase to underline. That October cutover needs quarter-to-date figures for someone who left in February, and their paystubs are inside a file about to stop accepting entries. Gusto's setup steps make you confirm both lists separately, active and dismissed.

Gusto's warning on the same page runs to one sentence: "Employers can only issue one W-2 per employee per year, so it's critical that previous payroll information is complete and correct." Which provider files which quarter is a tax question, and this site does not answer those — Gusto's article covers the split and your accountant owns it. The data-capture half has a deadline.

What you can get out of QuickBooks Desktop is a specific, named set of reports. Intuit's Export reports as Excel workbooks in QuickBooks Desktop page lists the Excel-based payroll reports, which it describes as containing "data that is only available in Excel":

Both routes prompt you to enable macros. Employee Sick & Vacation History is the one nobody remembers and everybody wants in March, because accrued balances carried forward are not derivable from a stack of paystubs.

The IIF file format is not a way around any of this. Intuit's Export, import, and edit IIF files page states that "You can only use IIF files to export payroll data from Core, Premium, and Elite Standalone Payroll." If your payroll runs inside Desktop rather than through one of those, the reports above are the export.

Reconciliations do not transfer because the two systems store different objects

This is the part that reads like a bug and is not one.

QuickBooks Desktop records reconciliation as a cleared marker on transactions plus a saved report. Intuit's Get reports for previous reconciliations page, updated 4 August 2026, draws a line by edition that decides how much of your history you can even see before you leave:

You can get reports for the last 120 reconciliations in QuickBooks Desktop Premier, Accountant, and Enterprise. However, the Previous Reconciliation report only shows your most recent reconciliation in QuickBooks Desktop Pro.

On Pro that is one report, whatever period it happens to cover. The same page calls the "Transactions cleared at the time of reconciliation" option "a snapshot", notes the report can be printed or exported as PDF or to Excel, and recommends saving them "each time you reconcile an account." That recommendation exists because the alternative is a permanent gap.

Xero keeps a different object. Its CSV bank statement import article tells you to delete columns "containing opening and closing balances, as Xero calculates the bank balance from the transactions." The Bank Reconciliation reports article makes the same point from the reporting side, defining Statement balance (calculated) as the sum of all imported bank statements and adding that it "isn't taken from your online bank balance, it's calculated using the bank statement lines in Xero." Its totals are Balance in Xero, Total Outstanding Payments/Receipts, and Total Unreconciled Statement Lines.

Put those definitions together and the outcome follows. A conversion that brings transactions but no statement lines produces a Xero organisation where the ledger looks right and the reconciliation screen is empty, because reconciliation in Xero matches two populations and only one arrived. Neither vendor frames it that way, so treat that as a reading of their definitions rather than a quote.

Getting statement lines in afterwards is documented, and the format you pick changes how much work follows. Xero's About manually importing bank transactions page says Xero "supports OFX, QFX, QIF, PDF, CSV and QuickBooks file formats" and recommends OFX "where possible" because those files import without editing. The OFX, QFX and QuickBooks import page adds one line that matters when you load overlapping date ranges: "Xero recognises duplicate transactions already imported in other files and excludes them during import." CSV has harder edges — no file above 100,000 rows, Date and Amount the only mandatory fields, income positive and expenses negative in one column with brackets accepted, and the bank account number stripped out. Two shortcuts are easy to skim past: a precoded CSV statement is "reconciled automatically when you import it", and where only a few are missing you can "create the account transactions in Xero, then manually mark them as reconciled instead."

Notice what Jet Convert's optional preparation actually asks you to check: that bank and credit card balances "match the bank statements as of the last reconciliation date", and that the AR/AP reconciliation report matches the general ledger. Both check a closing position, and that position is what gets carried across. The history behind it is yours to archive — see data retention requirements after you cancel for how long you need to be able to open it.

Attachments live in a folder the backup does not include

Intuit's QuickBooks Document Center FAQ answers this in a single exchange, and it changes what a .QBB is worth as a handover:

Will QuickBooks Backup/Restore backup the attached documents stored locally? No, QuickBooks backup does not include Attached Documents. You should make a manual backup of the "Attach" folder which can be found in the same location as your QuickBooks company file.

So when a conversion service asks for a .QBB, the documents are not in what you hand over. Nothing dropped them. They were never inside.

Four more lines from the same page change how you plan the copy.

• Attachments hang off far more than transactions. The FAQ says you can attach to "anything in QuickBooks that has the paperclip icon" — customers, vendors, employees, other names, the chart of accounts, inventory items and Company Info. An inventory that only walks the transaction register will undercount.
• The only per-file save route named is manual: right-click in the Doc Center or on the paperclip, then Save Copy to Desktop. Copying the Attach folder wholesale is faster, and it is what Intuit itself recommends.
• Condensing the file removes old attachments. The FAQ answers "Will condense remove old attachments?" with "Yes, however you will be asked to confirm this action before the attachments are removed." Condense is a normal pre-migration tidy-up. Here it is destructive.
• Renaming or moving the company file "will break the connection between the Attached Documents and company file." Repair runs from Company, then Documents, then Repair Attached Documents Links, and the steps involve matching a folder name to the new company file name by hand. Copy the folder before you reorganise anything.

What Xero's file library accepts on the way in is not settled here. Xero Central's file articles — About files in Xero, Upload files to Xero, Attach a file to a transaction or contact — all redirect anonymous readers to a login screen, so this article does not assert what they say. Anyone with a Xero login can read them in a minute, and that is the right way to answer it.

That leaves the approach this site recommends regardless of destination: a folder tree keyed to invoice and bill numbers, checksummed, held outside both systems, with any vendor's copy treated as a convenience rather than the record. For pulling files down when an export hands you links instead of documents, see how to download attachments from your export.

Field rules that decide whether a hand-built import lands

If you skip the conversion service, three Xero import screens do most of the work, and each has limits that are cheaper to read now than to discover at row 4,000.

Chart of accounts. Import a chart of accounts caps the file at 1,000 rows including the header and recommends a working limit of 699 accounts per organisation "to avoid page loading and slowness issues." Codes take up to 10 characters, names up to 150, both must be unique, and neither may start with a symbol. Three behaviours are worth reading twice. Xero "updates the existing accounts exactly as per the import file", and an account you delete from the file gets archived rather than left alone. Balances "import as conversion balances and overwrite any existing conversion balances", so leave that column blank if you are unsure. And if you change an account's Code and Name in the same pass, "Xero archives the account codes and creates new ones" — do it as two imports. The page also flags a structural difference that breaks naive mappings: Xero uses one accounts receivable and one accounts payable control account, and "Xero uses tracking categories instead of sub-accounts."

Jet Convert's preparation list points at the same rules from the sending side, and it matters which half of that list a task sits in. The essential half is short: have the admin password ready if the file is a .QBB, and check that your Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable and Tax accounts are not set to account type Bank Account. That one has a price attached — the page directs you to its paid bank mapping option if adjustments are required, and warns that a "reconversion charge may apply" if essential preparation is not completed before upload. The chart of accounts rules sit in the optional half: numbers to a maximum of 10 digits, names under 150 characters, no duplicate names — the example given is 1234 - Motor Vehicle Expenses alongside 1235 - Motor Vehicle Expenses. Optional means the conversion runs without them, not that the result reads the way you want.

Contacts. Import new contacts into Xero requires only the primary contact's name, wants files split above 1,000 contacts, and needs the admin role for bank account details. Its warning is the reason to rehearse: "You can't delete imported contacts but you can archive them. We recommend that you test the import file in the demo company first." Duplicates from a careless first pass become permanent furniture.

Invoices. Import customer invoices recommends no more than 500 items per file, requires only ContactName and InvoiceNumber, and treats each row as one invoice line — repeat the invoice number across rows to group lines into one invoice. Dates go in as MM/DD/YYYY. An invoice number that already exists in Xero means "that invoice won't be imported", quietly. And the template has no payment column — the field list runs from ContactName and InvoiceNumber through AccountCode, TaxType, tracking, dates and Discount, with nothing for amounts received. Invoices arrive "as drafts, which you can approve immediately or edit first." Settling the already-paid ones is a separate job, and that seam is where duplicate customers and unmatched payouts show up. The failure modes are catalogued in duplicate customers in QuickBooks sync.

Do not plan on IIF as the transaction route either. The Intuit article quoted earlier puts it in one line: "You can import transactions but you can't export them from QuickBooks." The menu item reads File, then Utilities, then Export, then Lists to IIF Files, and lists is what it means. IIF import also "doesn't link transactions", so an invoice and its payment arrive unconnected even going the other way. Transactions leave Desktop as reports, exported to Excel, CSV or PDF.

The order that keeps the old file readable

Cancellation timing has a documented trap on the Desktop side. Renew your subscription or use view-only mode in QuickBooks Desktop, updated 5 August 2026, says view-only mode exists in QuickBooks Desktop for Windows 2023 R3 and newer and QuickBooks for Mac Plus 2024 and newer, and lets you "view reports, but can't create any transactions." Each restriction rules someone out:

• View-only access is limited to Pro Plus, Premier Plus and Enterprise.
• Only company file admins can get in, and third-party apps cannot connect at all.
• "View-only mode might not work in multi-user mode. To access your data, switch to single user mode before you cancel your subscription."
• It does not work on Intuit Cloud Access/Hosting with Rightworks, and QuickBooks Point of Sale and Mac Plus 2023 and earlier have no view-only access whatsoever.
• It covers only licences already installed on the machine. Intuit says view-only mode "won't work in case of reinstallation", so rebuilding the PC after you cancel ends the access.
• In view-only mode you cannot view attachments linked to transactions. Advanced Inventory and Advanced Pricing have to be disabled as well. Anyone planning to treat view-only mode as the fallback for reading old documents should read that restriction twice.

Switch to single-user mode before cancelling, not after. That sentence is Intuit's, and the sequencing is the whole value of it. Intuit also recommends you "export your data before you cancel your subscription", and states that "as a QuickBooks Desktop user, you still own your data, regardless of subscription status" — the file reopens later with a compatible licence. The file is not hostage. Convenient access to it is.

A running order that respects all of the above:

1. Copy the Attach folder from beside the company file, before any rename, move or condense.
2. Run and export every Previous Reconciliation report the edition will give you — 120 on Premier, Accountant and Enterprise, one on Pro — as PDF and to Excel.
3. Run both Excel payroll report sets, covering everyone paid this year including leavers, and keep the workbooks with the quarter-to-date figures visible.
4. Export the reports you will want as evidence later: trial balance, general ledger detail, AR and AP ageing, inventory valuation, audit trail.
5. Export lists to IIF. That is your clean copy of customers, vendors, items and the chart of accounts.
6. Do the Jet Convert essential preparation, or fix the account codes, names and account types yourself if you are importing by hand.
7. Decide in writing how many years of history you are buying, before the conversion starts.
8. Take the .QBB and stop working in the file. The conversion reads a point in time, and work entered afterwards has to be re-entered. Jet Convert states this explicitly for QuickBooks Online, and a backup file makes it true by construction for Desktop.
9. Load bank statement lines into Xero for whatever period you actually need reconciled, in OFX where the bank offers it.
10. Switch to single-user mode. Then cancel.

Steps 1 through 5 are the ones that stop being possible. Everything else can be redone next month. How long to keep paying for both systems while you check the result is its own calculation, and the numbers are in parallel running.