Switching from Sage 50

Reconcile the first full month. The Banking screen shows the ledger's balance beside the bank's on the same row, so agreement is visible rather than calculated — and an unexplained difference is a finding to investigate rather than a number to adjust away.

When that reconciliation closes at zero and the trial balance balances, the opening position was right and the new books can be trusted.

Sage 50 migrations stumble on two things: years of accumulated chart-of-accounts sprawl, and payroll. The sprawl is an opportunity — a migration is the one moment when consolidating forty barely-used accounts into twelve costs nothing and improves every statement afterwards.

Payroll is no longer the blocker it was. SeroBooks runs payroll for Canada and the United States on the Pro plan, with T4s and W-2s and a pay run that reaches the ledger exactly once. The Record of Employment is the remaining gap, and if the ROE is central to your operation that has to be solved before anything else is discussed.

Do not import the old chart unexamined. Map it: which accounts carry real balances, which exist because of a one-off decision in 2014, and which should merge. Then open the new books with the chart you actually want, and the opening balances mapped onto it.

It is an hour of work that pays back at every month-end for years, and there is no better moment to do it than a cutover.

One test settles it: reconcile the first full month in the new system. If the bank agrees, the trial balance balances, and the stock count matches what the shelves hold, the migration is sound — everything else is detail. Do that one reconciliation attentively, and trust the books thereafter.

Until then, keep the old system readable rather than deleted. Nobody has ever regretted being able to look something up, and read-only access to your previous ledger costs nothing.