Hello! I have a very tactical question for the group. I am currently approaching the end of an acquisition process. We are about to begin legal due diligence. We're likely going to be structuring the deal as a stock purchase (using an F Reorg to get a step up in asset value). The seller currently maintains his books in QuickBooks. The books are a little messy today. There are expense categories reflecting expenses that the business incurred historically but will not have in the future. Also, there are a few equity accounts for assets that are no longer associated with the business.

Is it standard to take over a seller's QuickBooks account or start a new QuickBooks account from scratch?

In my mind, the latter seems cleaner. However, the former would save us a lot of time as we wouldn't have to set everything up from scratch and transfer historical data into the platform. I didn't know if there was a "best practice" here.