September 3, 2026
Moving accounting software in Australia: what actually happens to your history
The Australian shuffle
Australia runs on a handful of platforms — MYOB AccountRight and Essentials (see what each MYOB file can export), Reckon Accounts and Reckon One, Xero, and QuickBooks Online — and every year thousands of businesses move between them. The move itself is easy to buy. What is hard to buy is a move that keeps your history.
What the free migration paths carry
The bundled and free migration services that platforms offer exist to win your subscription, not to preserve your ledger. Typically they carry your chart, contacts, and opening balances, plus a limited window of recent transactions. Everything older becomes a PDF archive — unqueryable, unreconcilable, and invisible to the person who asks "what did we pay this supplier in 2022?"
What a real conversion carries
A proper conversion migrates the transaction history itself — invoices, bills, payments, journals — into the destination platform, with GST coding intact so historical BAS positions remain explainable, and with every control account reconciled against the source trial balance before you cut over. That is the difference between changing software and losing your past.
Leaving MYOB and undecided between the two destinations? MYOB to Xero vs MYOB to QuickBooks Online settles it in six questions: logins, jobs and categories, multi-currency, items and locations, payroll headcount, and your accountant.
Routes we run for Australian businesses
The most requested: MYOB to Xero, MYOB to QuickBooks, Reckon to Xero and Reckon to QuickBooks. Every engagement is fully remote, time-zone aligned, and fixed-price — quoted from your actual file, not a tier chart. Timing matters as much as the route: our guide to MYOB migration timing around EOFY compares a 1 July cutover with a BAS-quarter start and a mid-year move. Reckon Accounts Hosted users weighing Reckon’s free move to Reckon One should read Reckon Hosted vs Reckon One before Xero first.
Related: Conversions for Australia