I am finally at the end of the project to transfer the accounting data from Peachtree to QuickBooks. The biggest change was to change the account and job names. I opted to follow the recommendations of Intuit and others to use the Unified Chart of Accounts. This chart of accounts is very close to the chart of accounts recommended by Habitat International. Both of these chart of accounts are already set up to tie into the IRS Form 990. In fact the biggest change I made to Habitat International chart of accounts was to take advantage of classes to break out the different program costs and the administrative costs. Using classes to separate costs seems to be the trend among non-profits. The QuickBooks reports are geared up to take advantage of classes. I can always go back to the old account numbers. Being on the board of directors I think I would like to see a 990 like report so we can focus on what is program and what is administrative costs.
It took me a couple iterations to create the spreadsheet to transform the Peachtree data into the import format usable by QuickBooks. Splitting the bills into program(i.e. homebuilding costs) and administrative data was the key to increasing efficiency and accuracy. The homebuilding costs are always charged to a house using an item. The administrative costs use expense accounts directly. The import transactions are slightly different but if I used the job ledger report to build the input file for homebuilding costs I had all of the data in one report and I could eliminate manual entries. The purchase report had enough data to build the import file for the administrative costs. The final keys to efficiency was the use of the OFFSET(), ROW(), and VLOOKUP() functions. The OFFSET and ROW functions were necessary because the input and import data was spread over several rows and I wanted to use copy and paste to duplicate the formulas. I found I could minimize my manual entry by using VLOOKUP.