ExtractFoxHow to extract a chart of accounts from QuickBooks
Three reliable ways to get your full chart of accounts out of QuickBooks Online or Desktop — built-in export, IIF, and the API route — plus how to clean it up before re-importing somewhere else.
Most people pulling a chart of accounts out of QuickBooks are doing one of three things: migrating to a new accounting system, building a budget model, or feeding the structure into a reporting tool. The right export method depends on which one you're doing.
QuickBooks Online: the easy path
- Go to Transactions → Chart of Accounts (or Accounting → Chart of Accounts on older UIs).
- Click the small printer icon, then "Export to Excel" — or pick the gear icon to add columns first (account number, sub-account, balance).
- Open the .xlsx. You'll get account name, type, detail type, and balance.
The Excel export is enough for budgeting and reporting work. For migration, you usually need account numbers and parent-child relationships, both of which require the gear-icon column toggles before you export.
QuickBooks Desktop: IIF or Excel
From Desktop, File → Utilities → Export → Lists to IIF Files gives you the canonical machine-readable format. IIF preserves the account hierarchy and is what you'll want if you're moving into another QuickBooks file. For human-readable output, Lists → Chart of Accounts → Reports → Account Listing, then export to Excel.
The API route
If you need this on a schedule, the QuickBooks Online API exposes /v3/company/{realmId}/query?query=SELECT * FROM Account. You'll get JSON with every field including AccountSubType, Classification, CurrentBalance, and parent ref. OAuth 2.0 setup is the only friction; once you have a refresh token, the call itself is one line.
Cleaning up before re-import
QuickBooks' detail types don't map 1:1 to Xero, Sage, or NetSuite. Before importing anywhere else, you'll typically need to remap account types, decide what to do with sub-accounts (most systems flatten them), and resolve duplicates. This is spreadsheet work, not API work.
When the export is locked away
Sometimes you only have a PDF — an audit packet, a printout from a former bookkeeper, an attachment in an email thread. Drop it into ExtractFox's PDF data extractor with a prompt like "extract account number, name, type, and balance as a table" and you'll get a spreadsheet back without manually retyping 200 rows.