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A practical guide: moving from QuickBooks and Gusto to Thoshika

· 4 min read
The Thoshika team
The Thoshika team
ZPOA

Many US companies we speak to keep their accounts in QuickBooks and run payroll in Gusto. This guide walks through moving both to Thoshika with the data migration tool, and the checks to make before you switch over.

1. Choose your cut-over date​

Pick a clean date to start in Thoshika, usually the first day of a month, and ideally the first day of a quarter so that your Form 941 for the quarter comes from one system. You will bring lists and opening balances as at that date, and optionally the transactions of the current year.

For payroll, the start of a calendar year is the cleanest switch. If you move mid-year, you also bring year-to-date pay and withholding for every employee, so the W-2s Thoshika produces cover the full year.

2. Export from QuickBooks and Gusto​

From QuickBooks Desktop, export an IIF file; from QuickBooks Online, export the lists and reports as CSV:

  • Lists: chart of accounts, customers and vendors (with their tax IDs), and items.
  • Transactions: invoices, bills, payments, journal entries and credit memos for the period you want to bring across.

From Gusto, export employees and payroll reports:

  • employees with job, department, manager, work and home state, Form W-4 data and direct deposit details;
  • pay rates and recurring deductions;
  • PTO balances;
  • year-to-date pay and tax withholding by employee.

3. Prepare Thoshika​

Before importing, set up the basics:

  1. In People, add your legal entities and work locations with their states. The work state decides state withholding and SUI.
  2. Add each state tax registration: the withholding account number and the SUI account number with this year's rate.
  3. In Books, review the chart of accounts. QuickBooks account types are mapped to Books account groups during the import.
  4. Set the opening balance date.

4. Upload, map and dry run​

Open Admin, Data migration, choose QuickBooks or Gusto as the source and upload the file. Thoshika recognises the format and suggests the column mapping.

Then run a dry run. The whole import runs with all of the apps' rules and is then rolled back. You get a report of any rows that would be rejected and why, for example an employee without a work state or an invoice that refers to a missing customer. Fix them in the source or in the file, and run the dry run again until it is clean.

Import employees before pay rates, PTO balances and year-to-date figures, and lists before transactions.

5. Import and check​

Run the import. The report shows what was created, updated, skipped and rejected, the trial balance totals, and the amount left in opening balance equity. When account, customer, vendor and inventory openings agree, that amount is zero.

Then compare with your old systems:

  • the trial balance as at the cut-over date;
  • open invoices and bills, one by one;
  • inventory quantities and values by location;
  • year-to-date gross pay, federal and state withholding and FICA for each employee, against Gusto's year-to-date report.

If something went wrong, you can roll back the whole import: invoices and payments are voided and journals reversed. Re-running the same file later updates lists and skips transactions already posted, so nothing is duplicated.

6. Running both for a while​

Some companies keep QuickBooks Online in use during a transition, for example for an entity that moves later. The Integration Hub has a beta QuickBooks Online connector that can send journals and expense claims from Thoshika to QuickBooks Online. It is built on the vendor's published API and tested against recorded samples rather than live accounts, so check the first runs carefully. Thoshika is not affiliated with Intuit or Gusto.

Migration from QuickBooks or Gusto is free and done for you by our team if you prefer. For the full list of what the migration tool handles, see the data migration guide and the Books guide.