What has to come across when you move your books to a new tool?

The obligation follows the records, not the software

A tool is a place the records live, and leaving it ends nothing. Subsection 230(4) requires business records to be kept for a minimum of six years from the end of the latest year to which they relate, and a person who records them electronically must retain them in an electronically readable format. The obligation outlives the subscription that produced them.

CRA is explicit that outsourcing does not move the duty: the person must ensure the requirements are met in the event of third-party changes such as software and hardware conversions and upgrades. A migration is exactly such a change, which is why "the old provider had it" is not an answer to give an auditor.

What has to survive the move is the audit trail — CRA's definition is the information needed to recreate a sequence of events related to a business transaction. A closing balance carried across on its own recreates nothing; the transactions under it, and the documents under those, are what do.

What actually has to come across

Opening balances. Each bank account needs its balance and the date that balance is as at, so the activity that follows reconciles instead of floating. It is the one number that has to be right on the first day.

The receipt archive. It is the irreplaceable part, and the part migrations lose — QuickBooks Self-Employed customers lost scanned receipts on the way out of it. A deduction can be re-entered from a bank line; the document that supports the credit cannot be re-created, and a supplier that has closed cannot reissue it. Get the files out of the old tool before the account closes, whatever else waits.

The years still open. How far back to re-enter is a judgement rather than a rule. The retention obligation is discharged by keeping the old records readable, not by re-keying them, so re-entering several years of history into a new tool is rarely worth the week it costs. The current fiscal year, plus whatever the next year end actually needs, is the usual answer.

What does not have to come across. The prior year's corporate returns are not needed to keep books going forward — your CPA holds them and nothing in day-to-day bookkeeping reads them. Two figures inside them matter later: the closing balance of each capital cost allowance class, and any loss carried forward. Capital assets are entered here with the cost and the date they were acquired, and reconciling the pool that produces against the last filed schedule is a check worth asking your accountant for.

What LedgerLodge imports today, and what it does not

Bank statements. The importer accepts CSV, and bank-original PDF statements that carry a text layer. Scans, photographs and image-only PDFs are out of scope — there is no OCR — and a file that needs a password to open is refused. Every row is previewed before it is confirmed, and a preview stores nothing, so an abandoned file never reaches storage.

Receipts and expenses, one purchase at a time, with the images attached to the record they belong to. An opening balance per bank account, with the date it is as at. The free bank-statement converter on this site turns a bank-original PDF into a typed Excel workbook without an account, which is also a reasonable way to get a statement out of a bank and into whatever you are moving to.

There is no QuickBooks, Xero, Wave or FreshBooks importer, and no trial-balance or journal import. That is a statement about today rather than a philosophy, and the reason it has not been built first is the question every feature here has to answer: does this shrink the year-end pile? That pile is documents, not journal entries. The importers that shrink it are the one that reads a statement and the one that reads a receipt.

Leaving is the same problem in reverse

The test of a tool you are moving into is whether you could move out of it, so it belongs on this page rather than in a support article. Everything exports, at any time, in open formats: CSV and XLSX of the detail rows, monthly PDF statements, and self-contained ZIP packages that carry the source evidence files themselves rather than links that expire.

Books here are append-only. A correction is a recorded reversal rather than an edit that erases what was there, and a saved calculation keeps a snapshot of the dated rule row that produced it. That is what makes an export of last year still mean what it meant last year.

What this page does not say is that your records are safe here forever. That claim needs a production backup regime that has been restored from and witnessed, and until that exists it is not a claim this site makes — which is the same standard this page asks you to apply to the tool you are leaving.