I’m currently using Express Accounts by NCH Software for my small consulting business and looking to migrate to Manager. Before I dive in, I wanted to ask if anyone here has gone through the same migration and could share their experience.
A few specific questions:
Has anyone migrated from Express Accounts to Manager before? What approach worked best for you?
Express Accounts doesn’t seem to offer a clean CSV export for transactions or the general ledger (based on what I found in the NCH community forums). Has anyone found a workaround for extracting historical transaction data from Express Accounts in a format Manager can import?
Would you recommend migrating the full transaction history, or starting fresh with opening balances at a cutover date and archiving the old Express Accounts file for reference?
If starting with opening balances, is there a recommended way to structure the Chart of Accounts import so it lines up well with Manager’s default account structure?
Any tips, pitfalls to avoid, or step-by-step advice would be very appreciated.
I’m not at all familiar with your previous software but I can still offer some help elsewhere.
You can export in .pdf format and feed to any AI agent which will happily make the conversion to .csv.
Sure it may or may not work depending on the exported report layout, but it doesn’t hurt to try.
That depends on many factors, including:
Will you have access to your historical records for tax/audit purposes?
Do you internally need entire accounts history with you in Manager?
How much time effort and money does it cost to import your full account history.
If you can manage with an offline version of your previous records, I don’t see any benefit of migrating the entire thing.
I think it’s better to first understand how Manager works. Manager has control accounts structure which are comprised of children
e.g. Accounts Receivable is a controll account comprised of Customers
This is very much related to the functional tabs you see on the left pane of Manager. There are control accounts for:
Bank and Cash Accounts
Customers
Suppliers
Inventory Items
Employees
Fixed Assets (and related depreciation account)
Intangible Assets (and related amortization account)
Investments
Capital Accounts
Special Accounts (left for the user to define)
If you intend to use the full function of these tabs, you don’t have to create any ordinary balance sheet accounts for them
e.g. if you plan to issue Sales Invoices to your customers, you shouldn’t create an accounts receivable account in your Settings > Chart of Accounts.
Instead, you can just activate your Customers and Sales Invoices tabs and the syatem will automatically create Accounts Receivable for you.
In case you need to classify your Customers in separate control accounts, you can go to Settings > Controll Accounts > Customers and create as many controll accounts as needed.
There are a few other features to check out as well which you may want to know about before designing your chart of accounts, such as:
It’s not a big deal if you created extraneous accounts from the start. If you plan your work starting from the tabs, any extraneous accounts you create will most likely remain unused and you can later delete them with no problems to speak of.