How to Export Your QuickBooks Desktop Data Before Support Ends
No account needed for your first conversions. We never store your bank login.
Short answer: back up the company file first, then export your lists to IIF, your reports to Excel, and your transaction registers to CSV, and save PDF copies of the reports your accountant signs off on. Do it while the software still opens. A discontinued version of QuickBooks Desktop keeps working, but if the company file corrupts after your support date, Intuit will not help you recover it, and there is no newer version of Pro, Premier or Mac to move the file into.
This is worth an hour of your time even if you have no plans to leave. Exports are cheap insurance. The people who get hurt by a sunset are almost never the ones who moved early, they are the ones who assumed the file would always open and then discovered otherwise on a Tuesday in March with a filing deadline coming.
Why export now rather than later
Three things change when your version passes its service date, and only one of them is obvious.
The obvious one is that bank feeds, payroll and payments stop. The second is that live technical support stops, which means file corruption becomes your problem alone. The third, and the one people underestimate, is that security updates stop. An accounting application holding years of bank detail and customer records, no longer receiving patches, is a real exposure rather than a theoretical one.
None of that deletes your data. Your company file stays on your disk and the software keeps launching. But the safety net is gone, and exports are how you rebuild one. If you want the version by version dates, we keep a current breakdown of which releases are affected on our QuickBooks Desktop discontinued page.
Start with a real backup, not a copy
Before exporting anything, make a proper backup: File, then Back Up Company, then Create Local Backup. That produces a .QBB file, which is a complete, restorable snapshot. Dragging the .QBW file to a USB drive is not the same thing and has burned plenty of people, because a company file copied while QuickBooks has it open can be subtly damaged.
Put one copy somewhere off the machine. A backup living on the same computer as the original protects you from exactly one failure mode, and it is not the common one.
What QuickBooks Desktop can and cannot export
QuickBooks is generous with reports and stingy with transactions. Knowing which is which saves a lot of clicking.
| What you want out | How to get it | Format | Good for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chart of accounts, customers, vendors, items, employees | File, Utilities, Export, Lists to IIF Files | IIF | Rebuilding your setup in another QuickBooks company |
| Any report on screen | The Excel button on the report toolbar | XLSX or CSV | Analysis, handing figures to an accountant |
| Account registers and transaction detail | Run a Transaction Detail by Account report, set the date range to All, then export | XLSX or CSV | A readable permanent record of every transaction |
| Signed off financials | Print to PDF from the report window | Records that must not change, audit and lender requests | |
| The whole company | File, Back Up Company | QBB | Restoring into QuickBooks later |
The gap in that table is the one that catches people out. There is no single button that exports every transaction in a portable, re importable format. IIF handles lists well and transactions badly, and Intuit itself discourages using IIF to move transaction data. So the durable record of your history is a Transaction Detail by Account report exported to Excel, not an IIF dump.
The export checklist
Work through these in order. It takes about an hour for a typical small company file.
1. Back up the company file. File, Back Up Company, Create Local Backup. Store one copy off the machine.
2. Export your lists. File, Utilities, Export, Lists to IIF Files. Tick everything offered. This is your setup: accounts, customers, vendors, items, payroll items, classes.
3. Export a full transaction detail report. Reports, Accountant and Taxes, Transaction Detail by Account. Set the date range to All. Export to Excel. This single file is the most valuable thing you will produce, because it is a complete, human readable history that does not need QuickBooks to open.
4. Export the core financials, one file per year. Profit and Loss, Balance Sheet, and Statement of Cash Flows, for every year you need to keep. Excel for the working copies, PDF for the versions that were filed or given to a lender. These are also the files anyone else asks for first, so if the reason you are cleaning up your books is that you are thinking about selling, this is the set a valuation of the business gets built from.
5. Export supporting detail. A/R Aging Detail, A/P Aging Detail, and an inventory valuation report if you carry stock. These are the schedules people need later and cannot reconstruct from a P&L.
6. Save your reconciliation reports. Reports, Banking, Previous Reconciliation. Print each to PDF. If you ever have to prove a bank balance was reconciled, this is the evidence, and it is annoying to recreate.
7. Note where the audit trail sits. The audit trail lives inside the company file and does not export cleanly. If you need it, that is an argument for keeping the QuickBooks installation available rather than relying on exports alone.
How long should you keep all this?
The IRS generally expects you to keep records that support a return for three years from the date you filed. It runs longer in specific situations: six years if you underreported income by more than 25 percent, seven years if you are claiming a loss from worthless securities or a bad debt deduction, and indefinitely if you never filed a return or filed a fraudulent one.
Employment tax records have their own rule, at least four years after the tax is due or paid. And records tied to an asset, property, equipment, anything you depreciate, need to survive until the period of limitations runs out for the year you dispose of it, which can be a decade or more after you bought it. When in doubt keep the PDFs. They cost nothing to store.
Getting data back in is the harder half
Exporting is straightforward. Loading history into whatever you use next is where it gets fiddly, because the receiving software is picky about formats.
QuickBooks Desktop imports bank transactions as .QBO Web Connect files. QuickBooks Online accepts .QBO, .QFX, .OFX and CSV. Neither accepts QIF at all, which is the thing that blindsides anyone arriving from Quicken, Microsoft Money, Moneydance or Banktivity, because QIF is exactly what those applications hand you on the way out.
That is the gap this site closes. If your history is sitting in a QIF file, our converter turns it into a .QBO that QuickBooks imports as an ordinary Web Connect file, with balanced totals and deterministic transaction IDs so importing the same file twice does not double post. Upload the QIF at the top of this page and the QBO comes back in a few seconds.
One timing trap worth flagging if QuickBooks Online is where you are headed: Intuit limits how long you have to import a Desktop company file into a new Online company, measured from the date that company was created. The published window has been 60 days for a company you set up yourself, and longer when an accountant creates it through QuickBooks Online Accountant. The import also overwrites everything already in that Online company. Check the current limit before you create the account, because once it closes the documented fix is to cancel and start a fresh company.
Do I need to export if I am staying on my current version?
Yes, and arguably more so. If you are staying on a version that no longer gets support, exports are the only recovery plan you have. A supported user with a corrupted file can call Intuit. You cannot, and there is no newer Pro, Premier or Mac release to migrate the file into.
Treat it as an annual habit rather than a one off. Once a year, run the checklist above and drop the output in a dated folder. It takes an hour and it means a bad disk or a failed file never costs you your history.
Can I open a QuickBooks company file without QuickBooks?
Not properly. A .QBW file is a proprietary database and only QuickBooks reads it reliably. Third party viewers exist but they vary in quality and none of them are a substitute for the real application. This is precisely why the exports matter: an Excel file and a PDF will still open in twenty years, and a .QBW may not.
The practical position most small businesses land on is to keep the discontinued QuickBooks installed on one machine as a read only archive, keep the .QBB backups, and keep the Excel and PDF exports as the format that actually outlives the software. Belt and braces, and only one of the three depends on Intuit.
Where to go next
If you are still deciding whether to move, our breakdown of which QuickBooks Desktop versions are discontinued lays out the dates and the four realistic options. If you have already decided and you are carrying QIF files from an older finance app, start with QIF to QuickBooks Desktop or converting Quicken to QuickBooks. And if your bank feed is gone and you are downloading files by hand now, how to download a QBO file from your bank covers where each bank hides the Web Connect option.