Choosing your cutover date

The cutover date splits your Xero history: everything after it imports in full detail — invoices, payments, bank transactions, journals — while everything before is summarised into opening balances at that date.

Picking a date

• Start of your current financial year is the most common choice — a clean, audit-friendly line that keeps the current year fully detailed.

• Further back gives you more in-app history for comparisons, at the cost of a longer import.

• A GST period boundary is worth respecting — cutting mid-period makes the first GST return in Nightbooks harder to sanity-check.

What “summarised” means in practice

Before the cutover you will not see individual old transactions in Nightbooks — you will see correct opening balances for every account, verified against Xero’s trial balance to the cent. Your old detail remains in Xero, which you retain read access to. Reports spanning the cutover show summarised history on one side and full detail on the other.

When in doubt: start of the current financial year. It is the date your accountant would pick.