Ways to copy a QuickBooks Online company, compared

There's no button in QuickBooks Online that turns your company into a test copy. Here's every way people do it, what each one needs, and when it's the right choice. We make CopyMyBooks, so we've tried to be fair and linked to the sources.

At a glance

CopyMyBooks

Reads the real company through the QuickBooks Online API, with its admin's approval, and writes its lists and transactions into a free Intuit sandbox in order. Payments stay applied to their invoices, and starting balances give the sandbox the real company's balances on the day before your first date, so you don't need the whole history. Every copy is compared with the real company's profit and loss, balance sheet and trial balance (by record counts when amounts are disguised).

Fits when you want real books somewhere a mistake costs nothing: testing an app, rehearsing a change, practicing. Doesn't fit when you need company settings, payroll or bank feeds, a non-US company, or more than 25,000 records in one copy. How to copy.

Intuit's Copy company (QuickBooks Online Advanced)

QuickBooks Online Advanced's backup feature can copy one company into another: Settings, then Back up company, then the Copy tab. The company you copy into must be a QuickBooks Online Advanced company with no data, both companies need the same primary admin, and their accounts, sales tax agencies and bundles must match first. Intuit says a copy can stay pending for up to 72 hours. Its backups leave out things like recurring transactions, bank feeds and rules, reconciliation reports, custom form templates and the audit log, and reconciled transactions don't stay reconciled. Intuit's instructions.

Fits when you already pay for Advanced and want a second working company with its settings. Doesn't fit when you want a free test copy, or you'd rather not pay for and set up a second Advanced company.

Backup tools that replicate

Some QuickBooks Online backup services can restore or replicate one company into another. NinjaOne SaaS Backup (formerly Dropsuite) documents replicating into a developer sandbox; others, such as SysCloud, restore into another paid company. They're priced as backup subscriptions.

Fits when you already use one for backups. Check what it copies, whether it can write into a sandbox, and its price before you rely on it.

Spreadsheet imports into a second company

Export lists from the real company and import them into a second, paid QuickBooks Online company. Customers, vendors, products and the chart of accounts import well. Only some kinds of transactions can be imported, and the links between them, such as which payment paid which invoice, don't come along. This doesn't work into a sandbox: Intuit says sandboxes don't support importing or exporting data.

The qbo-sandbox gem

An open-source Ruby script that copies records through the API. Its own README says it was only tested with customers, vendors and items, and that records referring to other records will fail. It hasn't been updated since 2016. The repository.

Your own API script

Any developer can read from one company and write to a sandbox through the QuickBooks Online API. The hard part is everything around it: write order, mapping every reference to its new ID, keeping payments applied, tax codes, inventory quantities, recurring transactions, records QuickBooks refuses, rate limits, and checking the result. That's what CopyMyBooks does, so you don't have to.

Generated data

If you need realistic books but not anyone's real ones, generate them. EasyTestData, from the same team, fills a sandbox with a year of believable books for any of 10 industries. It's free and open source, and no real company is involved.

Questions