If some accounts are not in use" Simply Accounting conversion error
The converter found inactive accounts it cannot carry over, so it wants them removed in an older Simply Accounting version first.
You are mid-conversion, moving a Simply Accounting (now Sage 50 Canada) company into a newer version or into QuickBooks, and the process stops with:
If some accounts are not in use, open this company in an earlier version of Simply Accounting, remove the unused accounts, and then try the conversion process again.
In plain language: the converter hit chart-of-accounts entries it considers inactive or unusable, and it refuses to carry them forward. Rather than skipping them silently, it stops and asks you to clean them out first. The message is not telling you your data is destroyed. It is telling you the converter has a limit and wants the account list tidied before it will proceed.
Why the converter refuses inactive accounts
An account can sit in the chart of accounts with no transactions, a zero balance, or an “inactive” flag, and still block a conversion. Converters map every account in the source file to a counterpart in the destination. When an account has no history and no status the mapper can interpret, the mapping is ambiguous, and the converter bails out instead of guessing.
The trigger is usually one of these: accounts flagged inactive in the old file, accounts created but never used, or accounts whose records were partially cleaned up in a prior version. Which case applies depends on how the file was maintained over the years.
What the message is actually asking you to do
It wants you to open the company in the older Simply Accounting release, delete the unused accounts from the chart of accounts there, and re-run the conversion. That works when you still have the earlier version installed and a licence for it. Many people do not, which is why this message causes so much frustration: the fix it prescribes may not be available to you.
If you do have the old version, make a full backup first. Deleting accounts is irreversible in the source file, and you want a copy to return to if the wrong account gets removed.
When you cannot go back to an earlier version
If the old release is gone, or the accounts refuse to delete even there (some accounts are locked by the system and cannot be removed through the interface), the do-it-yourself route ends. This is a structural limit of the conversion tool, not a setting you can change.
Our engineers handle this situation directly. We can extract the active data from the Simply Accounting file, leave the dead accounts behind, and deliver a clean conversion to the target version or to QuickBooks. No earlier installation is needed on your side. See our Simply Accounting to QuickBooks conversion service for how that works, or our Sage 50 Canada conversion page if you are on a newer Sage 50 release.
A sensible next step
Before deleting anything, send us the file for a free evaluation. We will tell you which accounts are blocking the conversion, whether they can be removed safely, and what the cleanest path is for your specific data. The answer depends entirely on the file, so we look before advising.