Sage Intacct Migrations · Canada
Sage Intacct to QuickBooks, with your dimensions and your history intact.
Intacct earns its price when dimensional reporting and multi-entity consolidation are doing real work. When they are not, you are paying for a reporting engine you have stopped using. We move Canadian organizations off Intacct with the dimensional structure translated, not flattened, and client data processed in Canada throughout.
Bring your renewal date to the first call. The assessment is worth more before you re-sign than after.
Why Teams Leave
Sage Intacct rarely fails. It stops fitting.
Nobody leaves Intacct because it broke. They leave because the shape of the business changed and the platform did not shrink with it.
Dimensions nobody maintains
The dimensional model was designed during implementation, usually well. Three years on, half the dimension values are inactive, two dimensions are populated inconsistently, and the reports built on them quietly stopped being trusted. You are paying for dimensional reporting and exporting to Excel anyway.
Entities that consolidated away
Multi-entity console and automated eliminations are the other half of the price. After a wind-up, an amalgamation or a carve-out, plenty of Canadian organizations are running a two-entity structure on a platform priced for twenty.
The renewal, and the partner
Subscription plus modules plus a partner retainer to keep Smart Rules, report writers and integrations working. When the implementing partner exits or the retainer is the largest line, the total stops being defensible.
The Part That Matters Most
Your dimensions, and where each one lands
This is the whole migration. Get the dimensional translation right and your reports work on day one. Get it wrong and every management pack has to be rebuilt from scratch.
| Sage Intacct dimension | Typical QuickBooks destination | What to watch |
|---|---|---|
| Location | Location, or Class where locations are reporting units rather than places | Multi-entity Locations behave differently from single-entity ones. Which they are changes the mapping |
| Department | Class | The most common one-to-one. Watch for departments used as a second cost centre alongside Class |
| Project and Task | Projects, with tasks as sub-customers or items | Task-level history is where project reporting usually lives. Losing it silently is the classic failure |
| Customer and Vendor | Native customer and vendor records | Straightforward, but Intacct contacts and parent-child hierarchies need explicit mapping |
| Employee | Custom field, or a vendor record for reimbursements | Employee-dimensioned expense history is frequently dropped by default. Decide deliberately |
| Item and Warehouse | Products and services, and inventory sites | Only where the Inventory subscription is actually in use |
| Class | Class, or a custom field where Class and Department both exist | Both cannot map to QuickBooks Class. One has to give, and it is a business decision |
| Contract | Custom field, with revenue schedules rebuilt separately | Requires the Contracts subscription. Revenue recognition is handled as its own workstream |
| User-defined dimensions | Custom fields, or a Class or Location slot if one is free | Funds, grants, programs and lines of business usually live here. For nonprofits this is the reporting backbone |
QuickBooks has fewer native dimension slots than Intacct. Where you are using more dimensions than the destination has slots, the mapping workbook records which ones become custom fields and which are retired, and your controller signs it before anything loads.
Scope, Stated Plainly
What moves, and what does not
Written down before you book, so the scope is not a conversation you have later.
What moves
- Chart of accounts, mapped with your controller rather than auto-matched
- The dimensional structure, translated per the mapping workbook above
- Customers, vendors and items, with CAD and USD balances
- Full transactional history, reconciled per entity
- Open AR and AP with aging intact
- Inventory items and valuation where the Inventory module is in use
- GST, HST, PST and QST codes with filing history and input tax credit detail
- Financial reports and management packs, rebuilt in the destination
- Basic payroll records, carried at summary level
What does not, and why
- Smart Rules and Smart Events, which are Intacct-native validation and automation
- Financial Report Writer definitions, which are rebuilt rather than converted
- Transaction definitions and their configured workflow states
- Dynamic allocations, recreated as recurring entries or retired
- Statistical accounts, which have no QuickBooks equivalent and become custom reporting inputs
- User roles and permission structures, rebuilt to your approval matrix
- Marketplace and API integrations, which are re-selected rather than converted
Every item on this list is inventoried in discovery and given an explicit decision: replace, rebuild, or retire. Nothing is quietly dropped and discovered later.
Risk Register
What discovery looks for, and what usually breaks
Eight checks, every project, before a price is quoted.
Book types and multi-book
Intacct can run accrual, cash and user-defined books side by side. If more than one book is in genuine use, which book becomes the destination general ledger is a decision that has to be made before extraction, because it determines what every historical balance means.
Inter-entity transactions and eliminations
Automated eliminations and due-to and due-from relationships between entities are configuration, not transactions. Consolidated history is rebuilt so the eliminated position and the entity-level position both tie, rather than only one of them.
Revenue recognition schedules
Open contract revenue schedules and deferred balances do not migrate as transactions. They are recreated so the deferred balance and the future release schedule both tie. This is the most common source of a post-cutover variance nobody can explain.
Dimension data quality
Inactive dimension values still attached to history, dimensions populated on some transaction types and not others, and values that mean different things in different years. All of it surfaces in the assessment, with a recommendation on what to clean before the move and what to leave alone.
Report dependency trees
Financial Report Writer reports are frequently built on other reports, on dimension groups and on dimension structures. Rebuilding the visible management pack is easy. Finding the groupings and structures underneath it is the part that takes time, so we inventory the whole tree.
Attachments and supporting documents
Invoices, approvals and supporting documents attached to Intacct transactions are part of your audit trail. Whether they migrate, are exported to a document store, or stay with the read-only source is decided explicitly rather than by default.
Integrations and the API
Marketplace applications and anything authenticating against the Intacct web services API are inventoried, and each gets a decision to repoint, replace or retire. An integration nobody remembered is the classic week-one emergency.
Source data that is already wrong
Unapplied credits, dimensional gaps on posted entries, allocations that no longer reconcile. Real files contain all of these. We surface them and tell you which to fix first. Migrating a problem faithfully is still migrating a problem.
Method
How a Sage Intacct migration runs
Listen
Entities, the dimensional model, book types, module list, integrations and the renewal clock, mapped in one session.
Analyze
Data audit, the dimension mapping workbook, and a fixed-scope quote. You know the cost and the go-live date before committing.
Accelerate
Migration runs alongside live Intacct. Your team keeps posting and keeps closing. Nothing pauses.
Review
Penny-level reconciliation, dimensional reports compared side by side, controller sign-off, then cutover at a period close.
Built for Canadian Books
The part a US migration plan does not account for
Four sales tax regimes, sometimes at once
Ontario, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador use HST, administered federally. British Columbia, Saskatchewan and Manitoba charge GST plus a separately administered PST with its own registration. Quebec charges GST plus QST. Alberta and the three territories are GST only.
A multi-entity Intacct structure spanning provinces is carrying several registrations and several filing obligations at once. Each tax code is mapped to the correct regime and registration, because a code in the wrong bucket is a filing problem, not a display problem.
Input tax credit history has to survive
Your ITC position is built from transaction-level detail, not from a summary balance. Rebuilding tax codes from scratch in the destination and loading history without them removes the trail behind your filed returns, and it is only missed when a prior period is reviewed.
Tax codes, filing history and the underlying detail move together so previously filed returns still reconcile.
Six years of records, and the CRA expects them in Canada
The CRA requires books and records to be kept for six years from the end of the last tax year they relate to, and expects them kept at your Canadian place of business unless you have permission to keep them somewhere else.
This is why your Intacct instance is retained read-only rather than decommissioned at cutover, and why client data is processed in Canada for the duration of the engagement.
Fund and grant reporting for nonprofits
A large share of Canadian Intacct installs are nonprofits and member organizations using user-defined dimensions as funds, grants or programs. That structure is the reporting backbone and it is the first thing a flattened migration destroys.
Fund and grant dimensions are mapped deliberately, and the resulting reports are compared against your existing pack before cutover rather than after.
Destination
QuickBooks Online Advanced, or QuickBooks Enterprise
Both are real destinations for an Intacct exit. Which fits is a discovery answer, and it changes the scope and the price.
QuickBooks Online Advanced fits when
- Dimensional reporting maps cleanly onto classes, locations and projects
- Entity count is modest and consolidation is periodic rather than continuous
- Your finance team is distributed and cloud access matters
- You want custom roles and workflow approvals without a platform administrator
- Inventory is straightforward, or already lives in a dedicated system
QuickBooks Enterprise fits when
- Inventory is genuinely complex: assemblies, multiple locations, lots or serials
- Transaction volume is high enough that list and file size limits matter
- You need advanced pricing rules or heavier reporting against large volumes
- Your team is largely in one place and comfortable with a desktop workflow
If your dimensional model genuinely needs more depth than either destination offers, we will tell you on the discovery call rather than three weeks into the project.
Timelines and Investment
What a Sage Intacct exit costs, and how long it takes
Scoped after discovery, quoted as a fixed price, agreed before you commit.
| Engagement | Timeline | Investment |
|---|---|---|
| Standard Sage Intacct to QuickBooks migration | 30 days | Starting at CAD $10k |
| Multi-entity or extended history migration | 4 to 8 weeks | CAD $15k to $25k |
| Heavy dimensional rationalisation and migration | 8 to 12 weeks | Scoped to environment |
Figures in Canadian dollars. Final scope and price are confirmed after the data assessment, and the go-live date is agreed at the same time.
The Other Answer
When you should stay on Sage Intacct
We have no reason to sell you a move you will regret. These are the cases where staying is the better decision.
Dimensional reporting you actually use
If your board pack genuinely runs on six dimensions and every one is maintained, that is Intacct doing the job you bought it for. QuickBooks will not replace it, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.
Continuous multi-entity consolidation
Where you are consolidating many entities on a real cycle with automated eliminations, the console is earning its cost. A handful of entities consolidated quarterly is a different situation.
Contract revenue at real complexity
Multi-element arrangements with ongoing modification and reallocation are modelled properly in Intacct. If that is your business, you are buying something you use.
Cost alone is not a reason to move. A subscription that feels expensive but is doing work you depend on is cheaper than a migration that has to be reversed.
Canadian Proof
A national organization, off an on-premise ERP, in four weeks
Dairy Farmers of Canada, the national policy and promotional organization representing Canadian dairy producers, retired an on-premise Sage 300 environment for QuickBooks Online Advanced. Cloud access for a distributed finance team, and the on-premise server and its licensing overhead gone. A different source system to yours, and the same standard of execution.
What Canadian finance teams ask
Before you book
Does dimensional history really survive the move?
Yes, translated rather than flattened. Each Intacct dimension is mapped to a destination structure in a workbook your controller signs before anything loads, and the resulting reports are compared against your existing pack before cutover.
What happens where we use more dimensions than QuickBooks has slots?
The mapping workbook records which become custom fields and which are retired. This is a business decision made with you in discovery, not a technical default applied silently during the load.
We run multiple entities with eliminations. Is that in scope?
Yes. Consolidated history is rebuilt so both the entity-level position and the eliminated position tie. Which entities migrate, which consolidate and how intercompany resolves is agreed before extraction.
How is Canadian sales tax handled?
GST, HST, PST and QST codes are mapped to the correct regime and registration, with filing history and input tax credit detail, so previously filed returns still reconcile after the move.
Where is our data during the migration?
In Canada. Client data is processed in Canada for the duration of the engagement, and your Intacct instance is retained read-only. Nothing on the source side is deleted by us.
We are a nonprofit using dimensions as funds and grants. Does that work?
It is one of the more common Canadian Intacct situations. Fund, grant and program dimensions are mapped deliberately and the reporting is validated against your existing pack, because that structure is usually the first casualty of a careless migration.
What about Smart Rules and our custom reports?
Smart Rules and Smart Events are Intacct-native and do not convert. They are inventoried, and the validation they enforce is rebuilt using destination capability where it still matters. Financial Report Writer reports are rebuilt rather than converted.
Does payroll come across?
Basic payroll migration is included, carried at summary level so the general ledger stays correct. Detailed payroll history stays in the source system, which is what most Canadian year-end and audit processes expect.
How much detailed history can we bring?
Standard scope is full open items plus two to three years of detailed history, with earlier years carried as opening balances by period. Deeper history is possible and is priced in discovery rather than assumed.
Can this be done before our renewal date?
Usually, if the assessment happens early enough. Thirty days is the standard timeline for a single-entity migration with a clean dimensional model. Bring the renewal date to the first call and we plan backwards from it.
Is it reversible if something goes wrong?
Your Intacct instance is retained read-only and nothing on the source side is deleted. Cutover happens only after your controller signs off the reconciliation on a test conversion, so the decision point comes before the switch.
Can our accounting firm run this and keep the client?
Yes. Refer, white-label or co-deliver. The terms are written down and the engagement routes back to the firm. We do not take your client.
Accounting firm with a client on this platform?
Refer, white-label, or co-deliver the migration with our team while you keep the client relationship.
Playbooks
Before you decide, read the mechanics
Short, checkable pieces on the contract clauses and system limits that usually decide this. Each one names a document or a report you already own.
Seven things to export before you cancel Sage Intacct
Dimensions, allocation logic, statistical accounts and attached documents do not come out in a CSV, and the API dies with the contract.
Your renewal did not go up, your discount ran out
Why a 20 percent introductory discount unwinds as a 25 percent increase, and where in the original order form that condition is written.
Discovery Call
Book a Sage Intacct discovery call
Ninety minutes on your dimensions, entities and renewal clock. Fixed-scope quote after: or an honest recommendation to stay.
