Why we'll move your books by hand first

Ask a business owner why they haven't left QuickBooks and you rarely hear "I love QuickBooks". You hear "I can't face moving everything." Years of invoices, bills, customers and payments live there, and the accountant needs all of it at year-end. The CRA also expects you to keep your records, generally for six years.

So the move is the scary part, and it's where we're putting the most care.

A person does it with you

For our first customers, a member of our team handles the move from start to finish:

• Kickoff call. We learn how you work, which tools you use and what has to keep running on Monday morning.
• Full history. We bring across customers, suppliers, products and every transaction, not only opening balances.
• A week side by side. Both systems run in parallel, and we compare them until the balances match to the cent.
• Switch over together. We pick the day with you, then check in every day for the first two weeks.

Doing things that don't scale

This idea comes from Paul Graham's 2013 essay "Do Things that Don't Scale". In the early days, Airbnb's founders photographed hosts' homes themselves, and Stripe's founders set new customers up on the spot instead of waiting for them to sign up. Doing the work by hand taught them what customers needed, and gave those first customers an experience nobody else could match.

Moving books by hand is slow and expensive for us, and that's fine for now. It's the fastest way to learn where migrations go wrong, which QuickBooks quirks trip people up and what owners worry about most.

Then we turn it into tools

We time every move and write every step into a checklist. Anything we do twice becomes a tool: first importers our team runs, then ones customers can run themselves. Each move makes the next one faster and cheaper, and the things we learn by hand end up built into the product.

What we'll ask of you

About an hour for the kickoff, access to your QuickBooks Online company, a list of the other tools you use, and a few short check-ins while both systems run side by side. We do the rest.