Moving your records from QuickBooks

You do not have to leave QuickBooks, and mTenure does not read it. Moving across means carrying one number per tenant — what each of them owes you today — into a fresh ledger.

What actually moves

mTenure does not import your old system. It does not read your QuickBooks file, your Excel workbook, or your notebook. What moves across is much smaller than that:one number per tenant.

For each tenant, mTenure needs to know how much they currently owe you — or you owe them — as a single total, not a list of past invoices or payments. And it needs the date that number was correct as of, usually the day before you start billing through mTenure.

That is it. Not invoice history. Not payment history. Not your accounting records. mTenure calls this a tenant’s opening balance. Once it is entered, it becomes the very first, oldest entry on that tenant’s ledger inside mTenure, and everything from that day forward is tracked normally, in full detail.

Your old system is never converted, switched off, or deleted. Whatever you were using before keeps existing exactly as it was, as your own historical record. mTenure starts a new, complete ledger from the day you begin using it, with one number carried forward to stand for everything that came before.

What you need to have ready

Before your setup session, have these three things ready:

• Each tenant’s current balance, with a date. What that tenant owes you, or you owe them, today or as of a specific recent date — a single figure per tenant, not a breakdown.
• Tenant names and phone numbers. Whoever is renting each unit, and a phone number for sending them WhatsApp reminders later.
• Each tenancy’s monthly rent, and the deposit held, if you track deposits separately.

We enter all of it with you during the session, unit by unit and tenant by tenant. You supply the numbers; nobody else can, because nobody else has your records.

Where to find your numbers

mTenure does not connect to QuickBooks in any way. There is no export file it reads and no API it calls. What is needed is just the two things above, read off your own QuickBooks account:

• A current, per-customer outstanding-balance figure, as of a specific date, for every tenant you would list as a customer in QuickBooks.
• A customer list — tenant name and phone number for each.

Where to find it: the Customer Balance Summary report

1. In the left navigation bar, open Reports, then the Standard reports tab, and scroll to the “Who owes you” section. Customer Balance Summary is there. It is also pinned under Favorites at the top of Standard reports, and you can find it by typing its name into the report search box.

2. Open the report and click the “Report period” dropdown at the top left. It defaults to “All Dates” — choose “Custom dates” instead, and an “as of” date field appears next to it.

3. Type or pick the date. The report recalculates every customer’s outstanding balance — open invoices and charges, minus payments received — as of that date. Click “Run report” if it does not refresh on its own.

If you want aging detail for your own reference, the sibling report Accounts Receivable Aging Summary — also under “Who owes you” — shows the same per-customer totals split into current, 1–30, 31–60, 61–90 and 90+ days overdue, using the same Report period, Custom dates and “as of” mechanism. mTenure will not use it. See “What does not come across” below for why.

Have that report in front of you for your setup session, or read the figures out over the phone. QuickBooks itself is untouched — it keeps every invoice and payment you have ever recorded in it, as your own history.

How it goes, step by step

This is what actually happens on screen during your setup session, once your properties, units and tenants are in place.

1. Open the balances screen

   From mTenure’s Home screen you tap “Enter what each tenant owed before mTenure.” You see every active tenancy, one row each, with a running count — “0 of 9 tenancies entered” — and filters to show everyone, only those not yet entered, or only those already done. If nobody owes anything and nobody is owed anything, there is a “No one owed anything — skip” option on Home instead. It records that you checked, and moves on without creating anything.

2. Enter one tenant’s balance

   For a tenant who owes money, choose “Tenant owed me,” type the whole amount, and set the date that amount was correct as of. mTenure suggests a starting date, and it can be changed to whatever is actually right. For a tenant who is owed a credit instead — rare, an unreturned deposit refund, say — choose “I owed the tenant.” Everything else is the same.

   Before submitting, you read a confirmation line back: the exact amount, the exact date, and that this becomes a permanent ledger entry, correctable afterwards only by a reversal, never by editing it directly. If a save fails, mTenure says “Balance not saved — nothing was recorded. Try again.” Nothing is left half done.

3. Repeat, then move on

   Repeat for every tenant who owed something or was owed something. Once every active tenancy is either entered or skipped, this part is finished, and billing through mTenure starts from the next step.

Checking it is right

Once every tenant’s opening balance is entered, there is one moment that matters more than anything else in this process: does mTenure agree with you?

Go to mTenure’s Arrears screen. The total it shows — everything currently owed to you across every tenant — should equal what your own old records say you are owed, on the same day. This is the actual test of whether the move worked, and you are the one who checks it, not us. Nobody else can confirm the number is right, because nobody else has your old records.

If the two totals do not match, stop and say so before doing anything else. It is not something to quietly fix by re-entering a number — it is worth finding out why they differ first.

What does not come across

Being honest about the limits of this matters more than making it sound complete. Four things are worth knowing plainly.

• Aging is not preserved. The whole brought-forward amount counts as owed since the one date you gave it. mTenure does not work out which part of it is from last month versus three months ago, and does not split it across 30, 60 and 90-day buckets. The entry screen says so itself, in these words: “This whole amount will count as owed since [as-of date]. If it was really built up over several months, that is fine — the total is what matters for reminders and statements.” If a tenant’s balance genuinely built up gradually, mTenure still treats the whole of it as aged from the one date entered, which may look older or younger than the true month-by-month picture.
• mTenure is not accounting software. It is not double-entry bookkeeping, it is not integrated with KRA’s eTIMS system, it is not payroll, and it is not general expense management beyond maintenance costs tied to a specific unit. If tax filing runs off your existing system today, that system keeps doing that job — mTenure does not replace it.
• Recording payments day to day is manual, however you collect rent.mTenure has a bank-statement import that can suggest matches automatically, but it is not the sanctioned way payments get recorded at this stage. Typing each payment in by hand — cash, M-PESA, bank transfer, whatever the tenant actually used — is the current, primary path, and it works the same no matter how you collect. Nothing about that changes because of the move. Separately, and unrelated to opening balances: mTenure is built today for a landlord collecting through a bank paybill, till, or business account rather than a personal M-PESA number. That is a decision about who the product is for right now, not a technical limit on entering balances or recording payments by hand.
• Nothing about opening balances is imported from a file. There is no CSV upload, no Excel import, and no QuickBooks connector for this step, or for setting up tenants and properties generally. The only file import anywhere in mTenure is for reconciling ongoing bank payments after you have started, which is a separate, later part of using the product. Every opening balance is typed in by hand, one tenant at a time.

Talk to us about your own records

Tell us what you keep them in now and how many units you have, and we will tell you what moving across would involve for you specifically.

All three guides — QuickBooks, Excel, and a paper book.

QuickBooks is a trademark of Intuit Inc. mTenure is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Intuit Inc.