I got a nice comment from someone who offered to provide me some help with importing the lists (Accounts, Customers, Vendors) and their balances into QB. Getting Accounts, Customers, and Vendors into QuickBooks is the easy part. That reminded me that I needed to write a progress report to remind my of my thought process but where I have been. I'm getting to old to remember everything and sure do not want to invent this wheel twice.

Strategy

Since this is a small project my strategy is to bulk load the data and see what problems show up. So I used Peachtree to create spreadsheets of the customers and vendors.

What's Done

1. I created a new company file with a  UCOA Chart of Accounts recommended by Intuit.
2. I imported the customers using an Excel spreadsheet.
3. I imported the vendors using an Excel spreadsheet.
4. I imported the item list from HfHI.
5. I manually entered the three estimates.
6. I manually entered the three employees.

Work that still remains

1. Import bills
2. Import bill-payments
3. Link bills to bill-payments
4. Manually enter payroll checks.
5. Import or manually enter miscellanous general ledger entries

The biggest number of transactions is in bills and bill-payments. I have been evaluating an Excel addin by Big Red Consulting. It sounds like it should do the job but it gave me a problem with the imported lists. Since I will have to re-code a bunch of transactions I really want to be confident that the data validation is working correctly. I understand that QB is not very nice if your data is not clean. Since it does not look like a big job I am looking at coding up my own spreadsheet and macro for the two transaction types.