Migrating from Quickbooks POS to Lightspeed Retail: Overview

In this posting, we give an overview of the process of migrating from Intuit's Quickbooks Point of Sale (POS) to Lightspeed Retail Point of Sale (POS). In later posts, we will go into more detail on individual steps.

Before you can start a complex migration like this, you need to understand what exactly you are going to do.

Overview: Steps to Migrate from Quickbooks POS (QB POS) to Lightspeed Retail

This is a work in progress. May be steps missing.

1. Get new mac hardware set up
2. Freeze your Quickbooks POS (QB POS) system. This means no editing items or vendors, no receiving stock. No making POs, etc. Consider the system as read only. You are only using it for exporting data from this point forward. Before you do this step, it is good to spend some time cleaning up your Quickbooks POS (QB POS)
3. Export QB POS vendors. We'll show later how to filter this data to only include vendors you actually use in the POS.
4. Export QB POS "departments" a.k.a categories.
5. Export QB POS items.
6. Set up lightspeed. This includes many steps they cover in their documentation. Don't forget GL account mappings.
7. Import vendors using the import tool.
8. Import departments (product categories). There is no Lightspeed import tool (as of [TODO list LS version]) for categories (classes or families, in Lightspeed speak). Carefully copy from QB POS export spreadsheet into Lightspeed "classes". You could also use the Lightspeed product's "family" field.
9. Make a backup of Lightspeed database. Move that backup file to a place that won't get automatically deleted by Lightspeed's smart backups folder (it only keeps so many daily backups, and ours was nuked, but we were able to recover it using TimeMachine backup.
10. Import customers using Lightspeed import tool. We had to fix our customers.csv file from QB POS, as it contained characters Lightspeed silently barfs on (big time). I have a script which will do this for you. We also had to merge in some data from our customer sales report so we can see how much our customers have spent in the past from the new system.
11. Import items/products. Our products .csv file also needed to be cleaned up before Lightspeed could import correctly.
12. Map GL accounts to products. Watch out for the Accounts Payable mapping on products. That account should usually be left empty (unset). It is only used for things like a non-inventory "Shipping" product you can use to add freight to your supplier invoices.
13. Test everything. Make sure the system works correctly. I suggest testing sales, ordering stock, making supplier invoices, doing inventory adjustments. Post and export to your accounting package at each step. Work on a test copy of your accounting file and make sure the GL exports are doing the right thing in your accounting package. Chances are you'll find issues here and want to go back to step 10 above. We've done this a couple of times. Each time we start over with fresh customer and product exports to make sure our inventory is in sync when we go live.

There are more steps.. but this are the basic data migration steps we're following. Again more important details on each step are coming in later posts.

Processing Exports: Overview

For all the QB POS exports you do, you'll need to convert them to a different format which Lightspeed can read, a simple text file with comma-separated values, or a .csv file, for short. In our case, we also needed to combine some other QB POS data into these .csv files. For customers, we needed to bring their purchase totals from QB POS. In the QB POS customer export, there are no sales total per customer, because those numbers have be generated from a separate sales (by customer) report. For vendors, we needed to only include the vendors that the QB POS actually orders from. Many extra, unneeded, vendors were synced from Quickbooks Financial (everyone we've ever paid).

As of my version of QB POS (9 basic?), you need to have Excel installed on the POS to do some exports. This is pretty annoying for a Google Docs / Libre Office shop (and another instance of Intuit's default mode of costing their customers money).

TODO wrap up this overview article.