Switching from Wave

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.

Wave migrations are usually easy on data and hard on habit. A business leaving Wave is normally leaving because it grew — stock arrived, staff arrived, a counter arrived — and the new obligations that come with growth are the real adjustment, not the import.

Roles, approvals, stock counts and period locks are all things a one-person business never needed. They are not overhead; they are what keeps a business honest once more than one person can change the numbers.

The single most valuable migration task is the opening stock count, because Wave never held one. Count carefully, value at what you actually paid, and enter it as opening inventory — from that moment your balance sheet and your shelves describe the same business.

Receivables and payables come across the same way: open invoices and open bills, as at the cutover date.

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.