I've been looking into switching from Quickbooks. We don't want to be tied to Intuit any longer, but the major issue I've found with the applications I've looked at so far (Xero and Wave) is that the options for importing historical data are severely limited. They basically tell you to export out summaries for various accounts from Quickbooks and import those.

But we use Quickbooks as our main institutional memory so that's not enough. We offer services, we're not retail, so we don't carry an inventory, but we do a lot of custom work for customers, so having access to previous itemized invoices, estimates, and POs, is critical. That's how we know what we did last time or what we discussed with them 6, 8, 48 months ago. Often customers go 5, 6, 7 years or more between orders, so we need this information going way back. The company is 20 years old.

I see that I can import invoices (looks like a fair bit of work to wrangle the excel reports from Quickbooks, but it should be doable). I guess the question I have is - if we set up all the lists, accounts, etc that are in Quickbooks, then import things like transaction histories, are they automatically linked up to those accounts? That is, can we basically replicate the structure we have in Quickbooks, and simply import CSV or Excel files?

I've tested an easy one - contacts, and that seems to work well and Zoho's import is much better than Xero, since it lets you map fields on import. But if I import invoices, will those invoice be linked to those contacts? If i export a transaction list for a bank account, will those transactions (which reference customer names, items, and invoices, all get linked up, or is that something I would have to do manually (if it's possible at all).  

It seems that Zoho wants the invoices to be one-liners, but ours are sometimes dozens of itemized items in an invoice, which we'd want to keep. Is there any way to do that? Honestly, I could even live with the ability to attach a PDF to an invoice that just has the totals, if there's a way to automate that. We're talking a couple thousand invoices, and hundreds of estimates. But we could probably find a way to export them all from Quickbooks if we don't already have copies. Can these be tied to an invoice or estimate or PO as an attachment? 

If we can get past this set of hurdles, I'll have more questions, I'm sure, because that'll be a lot farther than I've gotten elsewhere...

Please, please don't suggest that we just keep Quickbooks around, The whole point is to move to something else so we no longer have to use it or maintain a working copy (which is becoming increasingly difficult as QB 2013 won't run on newer operating systems soon). 

Thanks