Switching from Quail Mall Manager — a step-by-step playbook for antique-mall operators
What to export from Quail, what we auto-map, how to verify the totals against your last settlement run, and how to flip the register over to a modern web POS without losing a Saturday.
Quail Mall Manager — sometimes still called Antique Mall Accounting — has run the back office of more U.S. antique malls than any other piece of software. It’s the desktop Windows app that prints dealer settlement statements, tracks tag numbers, and rings sales on the same PC you’ve had under the counter since the Bush administration. If you operate a mall that’s been open more than ten years, there’s a good chance Quail is what you’d write down if someone asked.
The reason malls stay on Quail isn’t loyalty. It’s data weight. Twenty years of dealer history, tag numbers tied to settlement statements, gift-card balances scattered across half a dozen ledgers — the prospect of moving any of that to a new system is what keeps operators clicking through the same crash-prone install on Windows 11 long after they’d otherwise have moved on.
This is the playbook for leaving Quail without losing any of that history. It’s the same path West Michigan Antique Mall walked, generalized so any Quail-using mall can run it.
What you’ll need before you start
The Quail back-office PC, signed in as a Quail administrator (not a cashier role).
A copy of your last Quail settlement run — paper or PDF — for reconciliation.
- About 90 minutes of quiet time at the back office.
- A browser pointed at vintique.com. That’s it; nothing to install.
If your Quail install crashes on export. A small share of older Quail 7 installs throw an error on the CSV export step because of a Crystal Reports library mismatch. The workaround we’ve seen work in every case: run the matching Crystal Reports report instead (Reports → Crystal Reports → Dealers / Inventory / Sales) and use its built-in Export → CSV. Same data, different export path.
1. Pick the cutover day before anything else
Pick a calm weekday — ideally one that isn’t the day after a sale event, isn’t the day before a busy weekend, and isn’t the first or last day of a month (your dealers expect their statements on a predictable cadence). Most Quail operators pick a Tuesday or Wednesday morning, ideally the week after their monthly settlement run goes out.
Tell dealers a day or two ahead. They don’t have to do anything new on day one — they just need to know that starting Wednesday morning, their statements will arrive by email instead of being printed and stuffed in a folder behind the counter.
2. Pull four exports from Quail the morning of
Don’t export weeks ahead. Run the exports the morning of the cutover so the data is current. From the Quail main menu:
Reports → Dealers — set the filter to All Active. Export to CSV or Excel. This is your booth-owner roster: dealer ID, name, contact info, commission %, and rent.
Reports → Inventory — set the date range to All. Export to CSV or Excel. Every priced item, indexed by tag number. Expect this to be the biggest file — a 70-booth mall typically exports 20,000 to 60,000 rows.
Reports → Gift Cards — current balances. This is the one that gets reconciled most carefully; nobody wants to tell a customer their $50 gift card is suddenly $0.
Reports → Sales History — set the date range to at least the last 12 months. Export to CSV or Excel. You don’t need 20 years; the last year is what feeds Vintique’s per-booth trend graphs and your tax filings.
On Quail 7 and older, the export option lives under File → Export → CSV rather than an icon on the report toolbar. Same data, same destination.
Your old gift cards keep working. Vintique generates new card numbers on import, but if you re-tag the physical card with the new number (or hand customers a new one on next visit), the balance moves with them. The mapping screen during import lets you keep the old number printed on the card as the customer-facing reference if you’d rather.
3. Open a Vintique workspace and start the Quail importer
New workspaces are free for 30 days and live in under a minute. Sign up at vintique.com/switch-from-quail, pick a plan, verify your email, and you’ll land in your mall’s dashboard. The signup flow asks what you’re coming from — pick Quail and a Quail-specific onboarding checklist replaces the generic one.
Open Settings → Import and start with Dealers first, then Inventory, then Gift Cards, then Sales History. The importer recognizes Quail’s column names automatically — Dealer ID, Tag Number, Tag Price, Date Sold, Sale Amount, Tender Type, Cashier — so the column-mapping step is usually a single confirmation click rather than 15 manual mappings.
Each import goes through a preview step. You see every row that’s about to land, every row that’s been flagged for review (a dealer with no commission %, a tag without a price, a transaction missing a tender type), and the totals. Nothing has touched the live database yet. If anything looks wrong, you fix the source file in Excel and re-upload.
Just committed something and noticed an issue? There’s a one-click undo on a freshly committed import — the database reverts to its pre-import state, you fix the file, and you re-import. This is the safety net that makes a same-day cutover realistic.
4. Reconcile against your last Quail settlement run
Before you turn the lights off on the Quail PC for good, open the back-office Reports menu in Vintique and run the equivalent four reports: Active Dealers, Inventory Value, Outstanding Gift Card Liability, and Sales by Month for the last 12 months. Lay them next to your last Quail settlement run and verify:
The active-dealer count matches within 1 or 2 (dealer status changes between systems are normal).
The inventory item count matches within 0.5%. Anything outside that range usually means a Quail export was filtered.
- The gift-card outstanding balance is identical to the dollar.
The last full month’s gross sales match within $5 (rounding differences on tax accrual are normal).
Five minutes of reconciliation here saves you a phone call from a dealer two weeks from now asking why their February statement looks light.
5. Walk one cashier through the four-step onboarding tour
While the imports run, sit a cashier in front of Vintique’s four-step tour: set their password, add a test booth owner, ring up a test sale, and invite a second cashier. It takes ten minutes. By the time the imports finish, they’ve already touched every workflow they’ll use on opening day. The Quail register UI is far enough from Vintique’s that this matters — and far enough that anyone who’s used Quail for years finds Vintique faster within a single shift.
6. Keep your existing card terminal
This is the part that surprises operators leaving Quail’s all-in-one register: Vintique intentionally does not process cards. Whatever processor and terminal you’ve been on — Worldpay, Heartland, First Data, a local bank merchant account — keeps running exactly as it does today. Vintique records the totals; the processor moves the money. That means no per-transaction fees from us, no card data in our systems, and no PCI scope to add to your plate.
7. Open the next morning on the new register
That’s the cutover. By the end of the same week, the back office should be quieter. Dealer settlement runs that used to take a full afternoon on the Quail PC now generate and email out in under a minute. The monthly inventory report Quail can’t easily produce — items added vs. sold vs. still on the floor, by dealer — is a single click. And the daily sales digest replaces the half-dozen “did anything of mine sell today?” calls dealers make each morning.
If Quail is no longer keeping up with the speed of the mall, it isn’t getting better. The playbook above is the cheapest, lowest-risk way to leave it behind — usually in an afternoon, sometimes in a single morning.
Open a workspace in under a minute. Bring your old data with the CSV importer. 30 days free, no charge until day 31.