Peachtree to QuickBooks: Planning Your Sage 50 US Conversion
Leaving Peachtree, now Sage 50 US, for QuickBooks? Our guide covers cleanup, cutoff dates, what moves, DIY versus a service, and checking the result.
Peachtree Accounting has carried the Sage 50 name for years, yet plenty of people still call it Peachtree. Searches for the old name even surface Atlanta’s famous road race before the software. The mix-up is fair: the company that built Peachtree started in Atlanta. This page is about the accounting package, and about planning its move to QuickBooks so nothing you need gets left behind.
Are Peachtree and Sage 50 US the same product?
For practical purposes, yes. Sage bought the Peachtree business years ago and later renamed the product Sage 50. The change was branding, not a rewrite: company data created under Peachtree carried forward into the later releases. For a conversion, it does not matter which name is on your installation.
Canada’s Simply Accounting was renamed Sage 50 as well. The US and Canadian programs are separate products, and a converter built for one will not read the other’s data. Know which one you have before you plan the move.
Decisions to make before anyone touches the data
Three choices shape the whole job. First, the destination: QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks Online take data in different ways, so settle that early. Second, the cutoff date: you can convert lists and balances as of a clean date instead of dragging every transaction across. Third, the history depth: lenders and auditors sometimes need comparative figures, so check before you trim.
A clean cutoff often falls on your fiscal year end, after the books are closed and the filings are done. Starting the QuickBooks file on the first day of a new year keeps two systems from overlapping.
What does a conversion actually move?
List data forms the core: the chart of accounts, customers, vendors, and items are the part every method can handle. From there it becomes a question of balances versus history. You can bring across opening balances, a limited stretch of transactions, or the full history, and the effort rises steeply with each step. Inventory valuation, payroll records, departments, and multi-currency entries all need decisions about where they land.
Ask any tool or service the same question: what lands where, and what gets dropped? If the answer arrives as a vague promise rather than a mapping, keep asking. The time to discover a gap is before you shut the old system down.
Cleaning up the old company first
Whatever is wrong in the old file travels with it. Reconcile the bank and credit card accounts to the cutoff, post the stragglers, and clear anything sitting in suspense. Merge accounts you never use, because a conversion is the cheapest moment to tidy a chart of accounts. Then take a backup from inside the program, confirm it restores, and store a copy away from the working machine.
Print the reports you will check against later: a trial balance, aged receivables and payables, and an inventory valuation, all as of the cutoff date. These become the acceptance tests for the new file. If the numbers never matched before the conversion, no converter can make them match after.
Should you run the conversion yourself?
The do-it-yourself route exports lists to Excel and imports them into QuickBooks, with opening balances keyed by hand. It suits a small company that needs lists and current balances, not history. Budget real time for it, and expect to fix mappings by hand when names do not line up.
A managed conversion reaches further. Lists and transaction history move together, mapped account by account, and the output is checked against the reports you saved. This is regular work for our engineers, and you can read about our Peachtree to QuickBooks conversion service before deciding. The trade is money in exchange for history and a checked result.
Checking the new file
Run the same reports in both systems as of the cutoff and compare them line by line. The trial balance comes first, then aged receivables and payables, then the inventory valuation. Chase every difference to a cause: an account mapped to the wrong type, a transaction dated just outside the cutoff, or an opening balance entered twice. Small differences are normal; unexplained ones are not.
Then freeze the old system. Keep it readable for lookups, but stop posting in it, because running two live books is how records drift apart. If questions come up later, answer them from the printed reports rather than by editing one set of books.
A sensible order of work
- Choose the destination and confirm it fits your user count, inventory needs, and reporting.
- Pick the cutoff date, ideally a fiscal year start, and close the books to that point.
- Clean up, reconcile, print the comparison reports, and take a verified backup.
- Run a list-only pass first, check it, then decide whether history should move too.
- Compare the reports, chase every difference, and freeze the old system on go-live day.
A dry run is the cheapest insurance in the whole project. Convert a copy, compare the reports, and only then commit to the real thing.