What Does Not Transfer From QuickBooks Desktop to Online

Several things do not transfer from QuickBooks Desktop to QuickBooks Online regardless of how clean your migration is: payroll item detail and prior-year employee totals, custom templates and saved custom reports, price levels, memorized transaction groups, and bank and credit card connections. None of these affect your trial balance, so a perfectly balanced file tells you nothing about them.

Why does a clean trial balance not cover this?

Because a trial balance only knows about account balances.

Every item on this page is either a setting, a template, a connection, or detail sitting underneath a balance. Your payroll expense account can be correct to the penny while the breakdown behind it — which employee, which pay item, which quarter — is simply absent. Balances agreeing and data being complete are two different claims.

What does not come across?

What	Impact	What to do
Payroll item breakdowns and prior-year employee YTD	High	Set up employees and YTD figures by hand in Online payroll before the first run
Custom templates for invoices and forms	Medium	Rebuild in Online; there is no import
Saved custom reports	Medium	Recreate the ones you actually use, not all of them
Price levels	Medium	Rebuild as needed; billing may depend on these
Memorized transaction groups	Low	Individual memorized transactions become recurring transactions; groups have no equivalent
Bank and credit card connections	Low	Reconnect each feed manually
Company settings such as name and address	Low	Re-enter in Account and Settings

Payroll is the one that causes real damage, because a first payroll run built on an incomplete file produces wrong tax figures that then need amending.

Why is payroll the worst of these?

Because it is the only item on the list where being wrong creates a filing obligation.

Prior-year employee year-to-date numbers drive tax calculations for the current year. If they did not migrate and you run payroll anyway, withholding is computed from the wrong base. The error compounds with every pay period and surfaces at quarter end.

Set employees up manually and reconcile YTD figures to your last Desktop payroll report before running anything.

What about memorized transactions specifically?

Individual memorized transactions do convert — they become recurring transactions in QuickBooks Online. Memorized transaction groups do not, because groups do not exist as a concept in Online.

If you relied on a group to fire six month-end journals together, you will have six recurring transactions with no relationship between them. They still run; they just no longer run as a set, and there is nothing to tell you when one is missing.

What should I do before switching off Desktop?

Step	Why
Export every saved custom report to Excel	They are not coming with you
Screenshot your invoice and form templates	Faster than reconstructing from memory
Print or export the payroll summary by employee	The source for rebuilding YTD figures
Note every bank feed and its login	You are reconnecting each one
List memorized transaction groups and their members	The grouping is what you lose

Do this while Desktop is still running. After support ends, bank feeds and connected services stop working, and recovering the detail becomes much harder.

How much of your file is this?

More than people expect, because none of it appears on a trial balance.

A real QuickBooks account listing we parsed held 89 accounts. Every one of those balances can migrate perfectly while all 7 categories in the table above stay behind, because not one of them is an account balance. A file can be 100% correct by the only measure most people check and still be missing its payroll history, its templates, and every bank feed.

Two dates make this urgent rather than theoretical. QuickBooks Desktop 2023 lost support on 31 May 2026, and Desktop 2024 — the final non-Enterprise release — is supported until 30 September 2027. Once support ends, bank feeds and connected services stop, which means the fastest way to recover any of this detail stops with them. Capture it while Desktop still runs.

Quick reference

Question	Answer
Does a balanced trial balance cover these?	No — none of them touch account balances
Which one is genuinely dangerous?	Payroll detail
Do memorized transactions migrate?	Individually yes, as groups no
Do bank feeds migrate?	No — reconnect each one manually
When should I capture all this?	Before Desktop support ends

The free check flags which of these apply to your file based on the accounts it finds, so you get a list scoped to your business rather than a generic one.