How you go live on Fintra, and how you would leave
The hard question about finance software is what the weeks after you sign look like: whether your opening balance is right, whether the first close ties to the last one, and whether you could leave if it went badly.
This page answers all three. Everything described here exists today.
Four steps from your old books to your first close.
Step 1: Bring the ledger over
- What Fintra does
- Fintra parses your QuickBooks Online, QuickBooks Desktop (IIF), or Xero export (the general ledger itself, not a summary) and maps every column to an account, a date, a transaction type and an amount.
- What you do
- Export from your current system and upload the file. Where a column is ambiguous, you confirm the mapping rather than Fintra guessing.
- How you know it worked
- You see a full preview of what will be created before anything is committed. Nothing lands in your books until you accept it.
Step 2: Set the opening position
- What Fintra does
- Your trial balance becomes the opening entry the whole model starts from: one balanced journal, dated at the boundary you choose.
- What you do
- Pick the date you want to start from and supply the trial balance as at that date.
- How you know it worked
- If it does not balance, Fintra refuses it and says which side is short. An opening balance that is quietly plugged is the defect you discover nine months later, at year end.
Step 3: Close one period in Fintra
- What Fintra does
- A close period with its own task list and reconciliations. Accounts are reconciled, tasks are signed off, the period closes and locks.
- What you do
- Run the first close with your own numbers, on a period you have already closed elsewhere, so you have something to compare against.
- How you know it worked
- The two closes agree, or the difference is itemised by account. A period that reads closed and still accepts postings is not closed, so the lock is real, and reopening is its own recorded act.
Step 4: Keep the record that proves it
- What Fintra does
- Every posting, approval and change carries who did it, when, and what it was based on. The evidence is produced as the work happens, not assembled afterwards.
- What you do
- Nothing. This is the part you do not have to remember to do.
- How you know it worked
- Your first audit, review or lender request is answered from the record rather than from a reconstruction.
Three things people are surprised by, said in advance.
- We do not have a parallel-run mode
- There is no feature that runs Fintra and your old system side by side and diffs them for you. What you can do, and what we would tell you to do, is close one period in both and compare the statements. That is a real afternoon of work, and it is the only comparison we would trust.
- $0 onboarding means no fee, not no work
- We do not charge an implementation fee, and incumbents charge $1,500 to $50,000. That is a pricing decision, not a claim that migration is effortless. The work above is real; it is measured in days, and how many depends almost entirely on the state of the books you are bringing.
- Messy books take longer, and we will say so
- Unreconciled bank accounts, an AR ledger that does not tie to the control account, or years of un-closed periods all have to be dealt with before an opening balance means anything. We would rather tell you that during the import preview than after you have signed.
You can take the whole ledger with you.
A system of record that cannot hand back what it was given is a trap, and you are right to ask before you move your books into one. So this is the part we test hardest.
- The whole general ledger
- Every account and every posted transaction, from the earliest entry to today, with beginning balances, natural signs, running balances and period totals. Not a summary, and not the last twelve months.
- In a layout the rest of the world reads
- Excel or CSV, laid out exactly the way QuickBooks Online exports its own general ledger. Your next system, or your accountant, already knows this shape.
- And it loads back in
- The file Fintra exports is a file Fintra can import. A test exports a book, imports it again, and fails if a single account lands on the wrong side.
No platform fee to export your general ledger. Exporting it is a standard Fintra capability while you are a customer, and we do not charge an extra fee to download it when you leave. Custom migration help, bespoke data transformations or other professional services may be priced separately.
Bring us the books you actually have.
The import preview runs against your real export and tells you what Fintra found before anything is committed: the fastest honest answer to how hard your migration will be.