Let me start by saying that I know the bare minimum about accounting. I am an educator and my husband has a small business. For MANY years, I have fumbled my way through his bookkeeping which is then cleaned up at year's end by our accountant and it is agonizing every time.

This summer, hubs did an "update" on his QB desktop and lost a full year of data. At the time, I was swamped and couldn't be arsed to try to fix it. This, of course, was a terrible decision and now I'm totally screwed.

In a flash of "brilliance", I decided to try to utilize QB online- thinking that I could just migrate everything there before rebuilding... all while seriously hoping that we would be able to find a way to restore everything. I now firmly believe that won't be happening.

Here's the thing. The business is barely staying profitable. I refuse to spend countless hours rebuilding it. So....

I have spent 12 hours with QB support with fck all to show for it. The agents never know what I'm talking about and if I can't get back to them within 24 hours, the ticket is closed which means I have to start over completely with the next agent. As I mentioned, I work full time and this simply can't be prioritized over my job. Because I procrastinated, there are new invoices etc. that will have to be magically merged with the restored version.

Thus far, I have...

1. backed up what we have (duh)
2. attempted to migrate what we have to QB online. This was done with QB support helping me but it takes 30 minutes or more to migrate to online and it hasn't worked yet. Each time, they tell me that I can call back if it doesn't work. Each time, we start over and it still doesn't work.
3. Attempted to migrate an older backup to the online version. This was before talking with support and I now understand that this would never have worked, which is why we tried migrating the current desktop data. This would have been followed by attempting to restore an older backup onto the desktop version so that I could try to cobble everything together.

I feel defeated over not being able to do this. Does anyone have words of wisdom, tips or tricks? At this point, I am ready to just start a new damn company on QB with just the 2023 transactions. Our accountant, understandably, says that this is not a good idea. I guess we have to weigh the pros and cons.

Any words of wisdom are appreciated.

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EDIT- Per everyone's advice, I trusted our accountant and he managed to get it back to where we originally lost the data. I appreciate everyone's advice. We did get migrated over to the online version. Instead of rebuilding 18 months worth of data, now we only have to do 5 and that was a slow 5 months, LOL. I appreciate that people took the time to answer!

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