Moving Your Clients to Coconut
Handling storing of receipts and invoices, and aligning accounting entries to your previous accounting system.
Updated over a week ago

If you have clients currently on other accounting software that you are looking to move to Coconut, this article shares some guidance on the best way to do it.

Importing your client list

If you have a list of clients that you want to import into Coconut, you can do this here:

This includes a template format for you to include your client names, email and contact numbers. They will be imported as pending client invites, but the invite emails won't be sent until you click 'send invite' through the Portal.

Migrating your own client data

Aligning Accounting Data

Coconut's accounting is driven primarily by the bank connections that your client makes. Once your client has connected their bank accounts, there are a few options for aligning Coconut to their previous accounting data:

  1. Export a G/L and a trial balance for a given period from your previous accounting software

  2. Understand how you intend to map the chart of accounts from the previous system into Coconut's chart of accounts (Coconut uses the same chart of accounts for all clients to make this process easier).

  3. Take a first pass to review the categories on the transactions in Coconut through the Accountant Platform - this will likely get everything coded roughly the same as your previous system before you start comparing records.

  4. Use the G/L entries from your previous system to compare and update the categories on each transaction in the Coconut Accountant Platform, in line with your mapping

  5. Use the trial balance from your previous system to compare the totals to the category totals down the left hand side of the bookkeeping tab in the Accountant Platform.

Coconut Partners can make use of our migration service.

Saving Receipts / Attachments / Invoices

Depending on your accounting system, you can normally export attachments such as receipts and invoices. If your previous system does not offer this functionality, there are often third party apps that allow you to extract this.

You can then import these into Coconut and match them to transactions.

Migration Service for Coconut Partners

If you have a client that you are migrating from other software and you want to align their accounting records, we offer a concierge service to help you with this.

There are two ways to migrate data:

  1. Coding Alignment: Get your client to connect their bank account(s) and we will align the category coding.

  2. Data Import: Provide us with a data export and we will import it to your client.

1. Coding Alignment
We will require the following:

  1. Confirmation of the Start date for the records to be aligned

  2. The client must have connected the same bank accounts that were used to build the accounting record in the previous system.

  3. General Ledger entries from the Start date to the current date

  4. Trial balance from the Start date to the current date

We will:

  1. Develop a mapping to the Coconut chart of accounts

  2. Review the transaction categorisation to ensure both income and expenses match to the previous accounting record

  3. Make any manual adjustments to bring the records in line with one another.

We will be able to go back as far as the beginning of the previous tax year (maximum 2 years prior).

2. Data Export

If you provide us with a transactional data export, such as a bank statement (with or without category codings), we can import this for you to your client. We will go back a maximum of 2 years.

Send your requests to [email protected]m.


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