QuickBooks to FrontAccounting – Conclusion

FrontAccounting is great; getting the data out of QuickBooks, not so much.

So I’ve been using FrontAccounting for awhile and found it to meet my expectations. I’m very pleased with it.

The conversion from QuickBooks on the other hand was a bit of a nightmare. I’d already decided not to convert the transaction data and start fresh with the new financial year. That part worked out well by dumping all of the reports, balances, etc from QB and starting a new company in FA with the balances from QB.

The conversion of the list data (in IIF file format) however was simply not worth the effort. If I had to do this again I would just re-key everything into FA.

I developed a process to extract the data from the IIF file using a series of Perl scripts to split the lists into CSV files. These were then fed into a PHP program to load into FA. While this worked, the research, reverse engineering, and development took way longer than I would have liked, and then still required significant manual editing.

The code is available on my GitHub at https://github.com/PaulShipley/import_quickbooks

While this works, I’m providing it ‘As Is’ and while I’m happy to answer questions about it, I’m not really recommending it for production use. It might be useful for someone that needs to extract data from IIF files, or loading list data into FA.