Medlin Software
Bringing your existing payroll data into Medlin Payroll costs nothing. This page is the working list — what to send, how to send it, and what happens after you do. This service is for Medlin Payroll only; Accounting and Receivables aren't part of it.
Coming from QuickBooks? Step-by-step instructions for QuickBooks Desktop and QuickBooks Online are further down, after How it works, with menu paths for everything we need. Start there.
At present we run this as a concierge service for customers switching from other payroll software. The biggest reason people stay with software they don't like is the data already inside it — paycheck data, employee records, and deduction setups locked into a system that makes leaving harder than staying. We try to take that off the table.
We take the information you supply and do our best to make it work in Medlin Payroll. The goal is to get your employee records and paycheck history into workable shape, because that's the part that takes the most work to rebuild by hand.
Conversion covers the current year only, from January 1 through your last paycheck. Anything from earlier years, including last year's W-2s and year-end filings, stays with your old system. We will try converting one set of data per customer ID.
Your data, your records. Once converted, the Medlin company file is yours, with no per-employee fees. Software shouldn't make leaving feel like a punishment for using it.
This is done by one person, who handles all of it, so we can't promise a completion date. Most conversions move quickly. If requests ever come in faster than we can do them well, we may slow down or pause for a bit rather than rush — and we'll tell you where you stand.
This is a real alternative, not a consolation prize. Plenty of people set up their own company file and enter their own starting figures, and for a short employee list it's often faster than gathering the reports. Two things to like about it: you wait on nobody, and your payroll data never leaves your computer.
The Getting Started topic in the Payroll documentation walks through it — company setup, employees, and entering year-to-date figures so your quarterly filings and W-2s come out right.
Once your license is active, pick your version: QuickBooks Desktop or QuickBooks Online. Plan on 20 minutes or so for the reports, plus a minute or two per employee if you're screenshotting W-4s. Gather everything first and email it all at once.
You'll end up with four Excel files.
The important one. Every paycheck, every employee, for the year, in one workbook.
Check before moving on: the tabs along the bottom should say Register, Detail, Exp Summary, YTD Summary, Comparison, and Tax Balances. Click the Register tab. You should see real Social Security numbers, not ***-**-1234.
Check before moving on: count the names. Does the list include people who left during the year? Anyone paid this year needs a W-2, and a W-2 without an address is just a strongly worded Post-it.
Skip this if you'd rather enter W-4s in Medlin yourself from the signed forms in your files.
If your employees are on 2020-or-later W-4s, that report can show leftover allowance counts from the old form. For the real numbers, go to Employee Center → double-click an employee → Payroll Info → Taxes → Federal tab. Screenshot it, or write down Filing Status, Claim Dependents, Other Income, Deductions, and Extra Withholding. Repeat for each current employee.
Carries your state unemployment rate and any deductions you have set up.
(Intuit has started calling the Online payroll side “QuickBooks Workforce.” Same thing, new name.)
Online has no single “whole year” workbook like QuickBooks Desktop does, so you'll run the same summary report once per quarter. It's more files, but each one is quick. You'll end up with a handful of files plus a screenshot, depending on the time of year.
Go to Reports → Standard reports, then scroll down to the Payroll section, or type the report name into the search box. To save one, open the report, click the Export icon, and choose Export to Excel.
For each quarter of this year that's already over, run:
Switching during January, February, or March? Skip this file. You have no finished quarters yet.
Check before moving on: the date line at the top of each file should show exactly one quarter. A single file covering 1/1 through today looks helpful but can't be split into quarters later. Not by us, anyway, and not honestly.
Check before moving on: you should see one line (or block) per paycheck, with a check date on each, not one line per employee. If it's one line per employee, you've got the summary report instead.
This one does double duty. It carries addresses, Social Security numbers, pay rates, and W-4 settings.
Check two things before moving on:
Online doesn't have a single report for this, so a screenshot is the fastest route.
Double-check the SUI rate against the most recent rate notice from your state. That notice is the one that counts.
These aren't in the files you're sending, or not reliably. Put them in your email:
Send the files to questions@medlin.com with the items above and your Medlin customer ID. We'll build your Medlin data from what you send and return it with a note on the gaps we see — a good starting point for your review.
Same rule as the rest of this page: we attempt to convert what you give us, as-is, and Medlin can't guarantee the accuracy of data or calculations created outside Medlin. Review the results side by side and fill in anything we flagged before your first payroll. It's a lot cheaper than finding a surprise in January.
Any time.
There's no best or worst time of year to convert, and you don't need to wait for the end of a quarter or calendar year. Send your reports whenever you're ready. There's no need to check with us first. If we need anything else, we'll tell you.
Send the actual reports from your current payroll system, either printed to PDF or exported directly from the software. Don't send a typed list — the reports themselves become the source data for the conversion.
For payroll software other than QuickBooks. QuickBooks users, see the QuickBooks section above.
A report showing name, address, Social Security number, hire date, pay rate, and W-4 information (filing status, dependents, and any additional withholding).
Common report names: Employee Detail, Employee Master, Employee Roster, Employee Directory, Employee Contact List.
This is the most important one. It should show every paycheck issued this year, for all employees, from January 1 through today — with a complete breakdown, not just totals:
A year-to-date summary only tells us where things stand today. The detailed check listing lets us reconstruct payroll activity across the year so quarterly filings, Forms 941, and year-end W-2s reconcile correctly.
Without it we can still get you running, but prior payroll history has to be entered as a lump-sum balance rather than detailed activity. We can usually work with a thin version — gross pay, total taxes, net pay — though we have to estimate how those totals were broken down, and the results aren't always exact. If your software offers a Detailed or Expanded version of the report, send that one. If we do work backward from summary numbers, we'll tell you which figures were reconstructed so you know where to look.
Common report names: Payroll Register, Check Register, Paycheck List, Payroll Details, Payroll Journal, Payroll Transaction Detail, Paycheck History, Employee Pay History, Payroll Activity Detail, Payroll Summary by Check Date.
Whatever your system calls it, the report should show individual paychecks, not just employee totals. Set the date range from January 1 through today. If your system only prints one quarter at a time, send all applicable quarters.
The same payroll categories as above, but summarized by employee rather than by paycheck. We use it to verify that the detailed check history ties out to employee year-to-date totals.
Common report names: Payroll Summary, Employee Earnings Record, Employee Totals, Payroll Totals by Employee.
A report showing your federal EIN, state tax ID numbers, state unemployment rate, deduction and benefit codes, and payroll schedule.
Common report names: Company Information, Tax Setup, Payroll Settings, Payroll Preferences.
Please don't send check images, bank statements, or general ledger reports.
CSV or Excel exports are preferred. PDFs printed directly from your payroll system also work well.
The hardest formats to work with are photos of printed reports, scanned paper reports, and PDFs created by scanning paper. Those often need extra review and may lead to a second round of requests.
Send whatever your system can produce. Things that often fill the gaps:
When in doubt, send too much rather than too little. We'll sort through it.
Email them to questions@medlin.com. Along with the files, tell us your Medlin customer ID, the name of the payroll software you're leaving, and roughly how many employees.
For added security you may put the files in a password-protected ZIP and send the password in a separate email, so the attachment and the password don't travel together. That said, most customers simply attach the files and send them. Your choice. How we handle what you send is covered in How we handle your data, below.
Our Privacy Policy covers the files you send and the messages back and forth. Files you send for conversion are handled like support files under that policy, and deleted after we return your converted file. One thing the policy doesn't spell out, so we will here: we use AI tools to help with conversions. Currently we use Claude, from Anthropic, and we have it set so our sessions, including your files, are not used to train it. Anthropic's own policies govern what it keeps on its end.
That means an AI tool sees your data, including employee names, addresses, Social Security numbers, and pay. Why AI? We never know what format or content your old software will hand over, since we don't control what other apps produce. AI copes with that variety better than a fixed import routine, and it handles the heavy sorting and reformatting. A person runs the process and reviews the results before anything comes back to you. That review is ours; the final one is still yours.
We don't offer a conversion without AI. If you'd rather no AI tool see your data, that's a fair choice: doing it yourself with our Getting Started topic keeps everything on your computer.
Most conversions are started the same day or the next business day. Some take a few minutes, others several days or longer, depending on the quality and complexity of the reports.
While the conversion is in progress, keep processing payroll in your current system. Keep doing that until your review is done, too.
Don't plan a payroll for the day your file comes back. There will be settings to review and information to set up before you're ready, and how long that takes depends on what your reports carried and how many employees you have.
When your Medlin Payroll company file comes back, it will include a note on the gaps we see. Start there: enter those items, check for anything else your business needs set up, then enter any payrolls that happened during the conversion period directly into Medlin. That's the most accurate approach, and it's one of the best ways to learn the software — using payroll information you already know.
Your last step is verification, and it's worth doing properly. Print the same reports from Medlin Payroll and compare them against the reports you sent us, employee by employee and quarter by quarter. Then create several test paychecks — a range of employees, not just one — and check the federal and state withholding against what your old system produced for similar pay. If we had to reconstruct any figures, we'll point out which ones.
Test paychecks don't have to stay in your data. You can calculate one and look at the figures without printing or saving it, or print and save it and then delete it afterward. Either way, clear them out before you run your first real payroll so they don't turn up in a quarterly report.
You're the one signing the payroll tax filings, so you should have the final look before moving forward.
Questions? Email questions@medlin.com.