Moving off Sage, QuickBooks, FreeAgent — or off spreadsheets — onto cloud accounting. We move the balances, the open invoices and the history, reconcile the new ledger back to the old one, and make sure the first VAT return files cleanly.
The most common botched migration lands every unpaid invoice as a single opening lump, so you can no longer see who owes you what. Aged debtors and creditors have to come across line by line, or credit control stops working on day one.
Switch mid-quarter and half the transactions sit in the old system and half in the new. The return still has to be filed from digital records with digital links between them — which is a real constraint on when you move, not a detail to sort out afterwards.
Reconnecting a bank feed usually re-imports a period you already have. Without a reconciliation back to the old ledger, the duplicates surface months later as a bank balance that will not agree — often at year end, when it's expensive.
A migration that lands a trial balance and nothing else is not finished — it has just moved the problem. This is the full list we work through.
mapped to the new system rather than dumped — old codes that nobody used get retired on the way across.
posted as at an agreed date and agreed back to your last set of accounts, so the new system starts from a figure you have already signed.
brought across where the platform allows it, so you keep comparatives and can answer a question about last year without booting up the old system.
each outstanding item as its own line, with its own date and reference — not a single opening balance.
de-duplicated as we go, because two spellings of the same supplier is how coding drifts.
feeds reconnected, the overlap period de-duplicated, and the closing bank balance reconciled to the statement.
scheme, periods and the MTD connection re-established so the first return from the new system files cleanly.
carried across mid-year where you're moving payroll too, so the P60s at year end are still right.
A company must keep its accounting records for six years from the end of the financial year they relate to; if you are self-employed it is at least five years after the 31 January submission deadline, and VAT records are generally six years. Those clocks carry on running on data that is sitting in a system you have stopped paying for.
So the last step of every migration we do is making sure the old records are exported, readable and filed somewhere you can actually reach them — before the old subscription lapses, not after.
Not if the migration is scoped properly. Most cloud platforms will accept historic transactions as well as opening balances, so comparatives and prior-year detail come across. Where a platform limits how much history it will take, the answer is not to shrug — it is to export the detail and keep it readable, because your legal duty to retain those records is unaffected by changing software.
A limited company must keep its accounting records for six years from the end of the financial year they relate to, and longer in some cases — for example where a transaction spans more than one accounting period. If you are self-employed, records must be kept for at least five years after the 31 January submission deadline for the relevant tax year. VAT records must generally be kept for six years. Migrating to new software does not restart or discharge any of that, which is why we file the old exports and backups as part of the job rather than switching the old system off and hoping.
You can, but it makes the first return harder. Under Making Tax Digital the figures on a VAT return must come from digital records, and where they are spread across more than one system the transfer between them has to be a digital link rather than a manual re-key. A cut-over at a period end removes that problem entirely, so unless there is a reason to move sooner, that is the date we aim for.
Usually Xero, because it is what we run our own practice on and it is where our automation and reporting are built — but the honest answer is that the software matters less than the setup. We are not tied to a platform, and if you are already on something that works, we will tell you so rather than sell you a migration.
For a straightforward limited company with clean records, typically a couple of weeks from cut-over date to signed-off opening balances. What stretches it is nearly always the state of the old ledger — unreconciled bank accounts, an aged debtors list full of items that were settled years ago — and that work would have had to happen at year end anyway.
Yes. A migration is a fixed-fee piece of work in its own right, and plenty of people take it on that basis and carry on with their existing accountant afterwards. We will quote it up front once we have seen the state of the current system.
Moving because of Making Tax Digital? Start with the MTD readiness checker — it tells you whether the deadline applies to you at all.
Book a free call. We'll look at the state of your existing system, tell you honestly whether moving is worth it, and quote the work before you commit to anything.
Book a free call →We checked these rather than relying on memory. Every figure and deadline above comes from HMRC directly — go and read them yourself if you'd like to.
Last reviewed 29-07-2026. Tax rules change — if you're reading this long after that date, check the source.
