Migration & onboarding
Your books move across without a leap of faith
Everything is staged and reconciled before a single figure reaches your live accounts. You see what will be written, you correct it while correcting is free, and you can reverse the whole run.
Four stages, and only one of them writes anything
The order is the point. Most of the work happens before anything is committed, which is why a migration that goes wrong here is a conversation rather than an incident.
- 01
Fetch
We pull from Zoho Books or QuickBooks over their APIs, or read the spreadsheets you already keep. Nothing is written to your live books at this point — the records land in a staging area that no report reads.
- 02
Compare
Every staged record is matched against what is already in CargoSurge and flagged as new, matched, or in conflict. You review the conflicts and correct them here, while a mistake is still free.
- 03
Commit
Only what you have approved is written, in dependency order so a bill never lands before its supplier. Each record keeps a link back to its source ID, so any figure can be traced to the system it came from.
- 04
Verify
Seven automatic checks run against what was written: record counts, amount totals, orphaned records, unlinked records, both directions of the source link, foreign-key integrity, and staging coverage.
What makes it safe to attempt
Moving a year of history between accounting systems is the part of changing software that people genuinely lose sleep over. These are the three things that answer it.
It reconciles, or it tells you where it does not
Control totals are compared before and after. Debits must equal credits on every journal entry, and the trial balance is reconciled against the source. A figure that does not agree is reported with the records behind it rather than absorbed into a total.
It can be undone
A migration run can be rolled back. That is the property that makes the rest of it safe to attempt — you are not making an irreversible decision on the strength of a preview.
It is signed off, not just finished
A migration certificate records what moved, what reconciled, and who accepted it — the evidence an auditor asks for when a year of history changes system halfway through.
Where your data comes from
Zoho Books and QuickBooks have direct connectors — customers, suppliers, invoices, bills, payments, credit notes and the chart of accounts, pulled over their APIs and staged for the review above.
Spreadsheets are the common case and are not a lesser one. Most forwarders arrive with a workbook per year and a folder of PDFs, and that is what the staging step exists for — it is easier to correct a thousand rows on screen than to discover the problem in next quarter’s VAT return.
Documents — trade licences, VAT certificates, supplier invoices — are read on upload, so the licence number and expiry are captured from the document rather than typed again.
How long it takes depends on your books, and we will not pretend otherwise
A single-entity forwarder with clean Zoho data is a different job from three companies, two currencies and four years of spreadsheets. We will look at what you have and tell you what it involves before you commit to anything — a number quoted before that would be a guess, and it is the wrong page to be guessing on.
And getting it back out
The second question, and a fair one. Your data is yours, and what exists today is:
- Every report exports — to CSV from the screen you are looking at, built from the columns you actually have in front of you rather than a separate fixed list.
- The FTA audit file — the invoice-level file the UAE tax authority asks for during an audit, in their format.
- Master data and finance ledgers — customers, suppliers, the chart of accounts, journals and statements.
A one-click export of an entire account is not something we offer today. We would rather say that here than let you find it out later — ask us and we will get you what you need.
Show us what you are working with
Send us a sample of your books and we will tell you what moving them involves — before you have paid for anything.