Can I Trust a Portable Copy of my Data? It’s so Small!

When we repair QuickBooks damaged files, or supercondense them, we usually ask that people transmit them to us in the form of a portable copy.

Why? Because it’s by far the smallest kind of backup of your data that you can make. QuickBooks might take a 1GB Enterprise QBW file (native format company data file) and create a portable copy that is perhaps 150MB. Much faster to send electronically!

Some people worry about that, though. More than one person has asked me “Are you getting all our information if we send that kind of file?”

The answer is yes. The portable copy contains all your raw accounting information.

How can it be so small, then? It’s because the portable copy doesn’t have any internal indexing in it. The indexes are recreated when you restore a portable copy, and the file size of the QBW returns to ‘normal’. That is why restoring a portable copy takes a long time relative to a regular QBB backup; QuickBooks has to reindex the file.

Portable copies are a great format to send files electronically, or to back up to a USB drive or online drive that has limited space.

Sometimes QuickBooks files will get corrupted in such a way that a portable copy cannot be created — you’ll get an error when trying to create one. Otherwise, it’s a reliable method of backing up your QuickBooks file.

No Comments by Shannon Tucker on January 17, 2012
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How to Close the Books in QuickBooks

In traditional accounting (and traditional accounting software) you ‘close the books’ at the end of a year. How do you do that in QuickBooks? Short answer: You don’t.

Right or wrong, QuickBooks keeps your accounting data around more or less permanently. You can run the QuickBooks archive/condense/clean up command (the naming of it differs across versions) but that has limited results. You can have your file supercondensed. But otherwise, your transaction history sticks around pretty much forever.

That’s a good thing for running historical reports whenever you want.

The potential for problems, however, comes through the ability to add, change, or delete entries made in a prior year — after you have already filed your company’s taxes. Definitely a no-no.

So how can you avoid that? It’s easy. Use the Set Closing Date and Password command in QuickBooks. That will more or less lock down your prior years’ information so that it cannot be altered without your controlled permission.

With your company file open in QuickBooks, click Edit / Preferences. Select the Accounting preference in the left pane. Then click the Company Preferences tab. You’ll see this:

QuickBooks company preferences screen

Click the button at the bottom called Set Date/Password. Here’s what you’ll see:

QuickBooks Set Closing Date and Password screen

This screen represents powerful accounting control for you.

At the Closing Date prompt, enter the date at which you want to restrict any changes (e.g. December 31 of the previous year).

Enter a password that is unique for this purpose (don’t recycle a user’s password here). Reason? If anyone tries to make a change to a transaction in a “closed” year, they won’t be able to do so without knowing this special password.

If you don’t create a password here, anyone who tries to enter or change a transaction prior to the closing date will get a warning, but will still be able to make the entry. You are leaving the door open to all kinds of problems if you don’t create a password here.

There is a checkbox to exclude sales orders, estimates, and purchase orders from the closing date limitation. Why? Well, those kinds of entries aren’t actually accounting transactions — they don’t post to your general ledger or subledger account balances, so changing them doesn’t change your financial reports. You may or may not want to check the box, depending on your accounting control policies and how you handle those kinds of pre-transactions in your business.

Close the books in QuickBooks? Not really. But that doesn’t mean you can’t control the the books.

No Comments by Shannon Tucker on January 10, 2012
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QuickBooks Comes in Lots of Flavors

ice cream conesQuickBooks comes in lots of flavors. That’s a good thing.

I remember as a kid growing up in Houston going to the Baskin Robbins store on Memorial Drive. 31 flavors! Mint Chocolate Chip or Rocky Road…hmmmm…

QuickBooks users make choices too.

The hot choice these days, at least from Intuit’s point of view, is QuickBooks Online. I just read an article interview with Intuit’s CFO that said that QuickBooks Online is growing at 30% per year and accounts for two-thirds of sales.

That edition’s advantages? There are several. You never have to worry about updating your software or data. You don’t have to worry about local network IT, as far as QuickBooks is concerned. Your team can access the books from any office, anywhere.

The most popular choice in the desktop editions? QuickBooks Pro. It has all the general accounting functionality that most small businesses need, and has a ton of optional add-in offerings that extend its usefulness even further. It’s affordable ($154.96 on Amazon as of today). Main drawback? As of the 2011 version, you can only have three licenses on a network. That means only three simultaneous users.

Next flavor? Premier edition. This actually comes in a number of sub-flavors according to the type of business you have: Contractors, NonProfit, Manufacturing and Wholesale, Professional Services, Retail and Accountant versions. The Contractors and Manufacturers versions are especially popular. You can have up to five licenses on a network with the Premier edition, and you can buy 3-bundle licenses.

The heaviest lifting is done by the Enterprise edition. There are subflavors here as well that are industry-specific. Intuit has tuned this edition to perform under heavy user loads. I spoke with a user yesterday who had 25 Enterprise users on their network. (And that sometimes can bog down if the data file is very large. That’s why we supercondense a lot of large files for Enterprise users these days.)

Enterprise also is the only QuickBooks edition that has advanced inventory functions. It is the only edition except for 2012 Premier Accountants edition that can have more than one company open at a time. But mostly, it’s about IT performance for businesses with high transaction volume or heavy-duty inventory.

The various editions of QuickBooks mix and mingle within limits. You can upgrade your QuickBooks file to a higher edition whenever you want. That is, a Pro file will convert to Premier no problem. Either of these will convert to Enterprise. Any of those will convert to QuickBooks Online.

There is a 140MB size limit for converting from any of the desktop editions to QuickBooks Online, however. We often see files from people whose file size exceeds that, and we remove old years’ data to get the file small enough to convert to QuickBooks Online. (This is another application of our supercondense service.)

Data can be downgraded from Enterprise to Pro or Premier, but only with special conversion services.

Within the same edition, older version company files will automatically upgrade to newer versions whenever you open the company in the newer version. The opposite is not true, however: Newer version data cannot be converted to older versions (QuickBooks Pro 2011 cannot be converted to QuickBooks Pro 2010, for example).

You’ve also got the Mac version of QuickBooks. It kind of lives alone in the QuickBooks universe.

Anyway, you don’t have 31 flavors to pick from, but you do have several.

No Comments by Shannon Tucker on January 3, 2012
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Our Most Popular QuickBooks Articles of 2011

What were QuickBooks users reading about in 2011? Here are the articles on our website that had the most reads during the year. Maybe what you learn in one of them will make your New Year just a little better.

1. 13 Steps to Implementing Job Costing in QuickBooks for Contractors

Job costing is an important function for every business that has employees, sells goods, or provides services to customers. Job costing is especially important for contractors, because you need to know if you are making money on the jobs that you have been awarded…

2. How to Open QuickBooks When It Won’t Open

Occasionally, QuickBooks users find themselves in a Catch-22: They need to restore a backup in QuickBooks, but they can’t get QuickBooks itself to open.

This can happen if your company file got damaged during your last session in the program. Perhaps the power went off and your computer turned off without closing out QuickBooks first, or there was a network hiccup, or some other kind of hardware problem…

3. How to Transfer QuickBooks from One Computer to Another

Did you get yourself a shiny new computer on Black Friday or Cyber Monday? Or maybe you just need to get some year-end bookkeeping done on your laptop over the holidays?

If you need to get QuickBooks from one computer to another, it’s not a big deal. Here’s what you do…

4. My QuickBooks File Is HUGE! What Can I Do?

I’ve talked to a lot of QuickBooks users who have told me their QuickBooks file is too big.

According to several Pro and Premier end users, Intuit support told them that you should upgrade to QuickBooks Enterprise Edition if your company file size exceeds 100MB.

Whoa, hold on pardner…

5. What to Do When QuickBooks Is (Not Responding)

Has this happened to you? I’m guessing you’ve seen it before: You’re trying to update your company, or make a backup, or verify your company, or run a big report.

QuickBooks gets off to a good start, but then seems to stall. You make a couple of clicks and Windows pipes up: “(Not Responding)”. Oh, great…

—————

Well, that’s the best from 2011. Here’s hoping that 2012 is a great year for you and that QuickBooks is your stalwart helper in the back office.

3 Comments by Shannon Tucker on January 2, 2012
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Bend, Don’t Break

Pine tree broken by high winds

One of many pine trees broken off by high winds

A windstorm came through central Colorado last month. The wind meter at the airport clocked gusts of up to 79MPH, breaking the all time record.

In my neighborhood, I counted 8 broken-off ponderosa pines as I drove down the main road the next day.

There was one tree with a five foot diameter trunk, broken completely off. That tree had to have been hundreds of years old.

They couldn’t bend enough. So they broke.

Most businesses these days feel the economic gales pushing against their trunks.

Bend, don’t break.

Do you need a cash infusion to give more flexibility until cash is self-sustaining through your operations?

Do you need to restructure or renegotiate some debt so the wind doesn’t push as hard?

Do you need to find a consulting CFO to review your books to see if there are costs or expenses that are disproportionately high for your kind of business?

Do you need to change your approach to customer terms and collections so that the cash comes in quicker?

Do you need to prune off departments/locations/branches that cause stress to the whole organization?

We’ve had to do that. We’ve gotten out of some business areas that were not at our core and that were not very profitable or strategic. That helped.

Bend, don’t break. And here’s to to the hope that the wind won’t blow as hard in 2012.

No Comments by Shannon Tucker on December 22, 2011
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Two QuickBooks Users Deal with Their Very Large Files

If you run QuickBooks week after week, year after year, your QBW data file gets pretty big. (Press the F2 key in QuickBooks with your company open to see how big your file is.)

What if it gets so big that performance starts to suffer? Or you start to experience errors or intermittent problems in the software?

Two different QuickBooks users recently had that experience, and sent their files in to us to be supercondensed.

What is supercondensing? It is a process where we remove all closed transactions from a file prior to a cut off date of your choosing. We leave all the transactions ahead of the cut off date, and we leave open or pending transactions regardless of their date.

The end result is a file that is quite small and fast compared to the original.

We often schedule these on weekends, so that there is no downtime on the client’s side.

Here is what a couple of our clients said about their experience in having us condense their file this way (quoted by permission):

“We are very pleased. We ended up with a smaller file size than estimated. Very convenient for a business b/c I sent the file on Friday @ 5:00 pm and it was returned and reloaded Sunday afternoon. We were up and running on Monday w/o any problems.”
— Vicki Hilliard, Patio Supply

“AccountingUsers did exactly as they promised. We sent our file to them on a Friday and received our file back on Saturday afternoon. I downloaded the new file, installed it and was up and running Monday morning with absolutely no down time. Our Quickbooks is so much faster now. I wish I had used their service much sooner!” — Lynn Wrinkle, Blade Energy Partners

Weekend service for supercondensing is available for no extra charge.

No Comments by Shannon Tucker on December 8, 2011
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What Are the Most Important Questions Your QuickBooks Data Can Answer?

QuickBooks can be more than just a basic bookkeeping program for you. It can help you address some of the biggest challenges and opportunities your business faces. Here are some of the most important questions QuickBooks can help you answer:

1. Am I making money, or losing money? Assuming that you enter information into QuickBooks correctly, QuickBooks will generate reports for you that will very simply answer this question.

Run Profit and Loss reports (found in Reports / Company and Financial ) to see whether you are making more money than you are spending. (Hopefully your company is doing better on this than the U.S. government!)

The Profit and Loss Prev Year Comparison report is especially helpful. With it you can tell if you are making or losing money in greater amounts than last year. Why is that important? Well, it can help you decide if your business is going in the right direction, or if you need to make important changes.

I’ve read that most new businesses fail because they don’t know if they are making money or not. If you are using QuickBooks, you shouldn’t be in the dark about whether you’re profitable.

2. Do I have enough cash? Are my business operations generating enough cash to fund the business? Run the Statement of Cash Flows report to see. You can run the report for different date ranges to try to determine what the trend is.

3. Who owes me money? Of course, that’s what the Customer Center is about in QuickBooks. But if you want to get an instant look at the highlights, go to Company Snapshot, and look at the “Customers Who Owe Money” pane. (If that pane is not enabled in your Company Snapshot screen, you can click Add Content and select that screen to put it into your snapshot). By instantly seeing which customers are in arrears, you can get on the phone and work on collections.

4. Which parts of my business are profitable, and which are not? If you use classes in your QuickBooks data, you can track profitability in different ways. For example, you can track profitability by location, by department, by division, by market…

The Profit & Loss by Class report then becomes very interesting. That report will show a separate column for each of your classes — your business areas. You can then see and evaluate the profitability of each. Is one of your business areas unprofitable? What will you do about it? Is one of your business areas especially profitable? What can you do to maximize that?

If you want more help in deciphering these issues, make an appointment with your CPA and come to the meeting armed with these reports. He or she will be glad to help you understand your company’s financial big picture.

2 Comments by Shannon Tucker on November 30, 2011
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The User Who Sailed Around the QuickBooks Sunset (Policy)

sunset photoSunsets are wonderful, beautiful things, unless you’re talking about a software sunset — a planned discontinuance of support for an older version of your software. That can be frustrating in certain situations. Here’s a story of a QuickBooks user who found a way around that.

But first, a bit of background. As of now, QuickBooks Windows and Mac versions for 2012, 2011, 2010, and 2009 are fully supported by Intuit. Prior versions are not. The 2008 version was “sunsetted” by Intuit in May of 2011. This is in accordance with their policy of supporting the current and prior two versions of QuickBooks (which in my opinion makes perfectly good sense, but that’s another subject).

From a user’s point of view, the sunset policy matters only if your software requires ongoing support by Intuit. But support means lots of different things in QuickBooks these days — not just payroll subscriptions, but online banking, credit card processing, online backups and, of course, telephone support.

If you don’t need any of that? You can keep using your old version just fine.

But what if you need to install and register your old version of QuickBooks on a new computer, and you don’t have your original install codes written down anywhere?
Intuit support won’t give them to you, because you are using an unsupported version.

In another blog post that describes how to move your QuickBooks installation from one computer to another, a user described how he was stymied. He had been using a 2007 version of QuickBooks and didn’t have his registration codes. So he couldn’t install the software on his new computer.

But…he figured it out! Since he still had access to his old computer, he found that he could pull his license number and product number from his existing installation and use that on his new computer. He gives the step by step instructions in his blog comment.

If you don’t have your original install CD, you’re still in business, because you can download old versions from Intuit’s website (at least as of today) from here.

It’s always possible, of course, that there will be a hitch in that registration process and the software will force you to call Intuit, in which case you’re out of luck. Likewise, you’re messed up if you don’t have your install codes written down AND you cannot access your original QuickBooks installation (if your hard drive totally failed, for example). But otherwise, you have a good chance of getting your old software up and running on new equipment.

That was one user’s experience, anyway.

4 Comments by Shannon Tucker on November 30, 2011
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Where in the World Are QuickBooks Users?

My town has an ice cream place with a dot board in it. You know, a map of the world, and the customers get a stick-em colored dot and put it on the map if their part of the world isn’t already represented. By the end of the summer, their world map has dots all over it (it’s a popular ice cream shop!)

Ever wondered about QuickBooks’ global reach? It really is used by people all over the world. Here is sort of a ‘dot board’ of where visitors to our independent QuickBooks Forums are from:

map of the world and quickbooks users

Visitors to the QuickBooks Forums, Mapped

I think it’s interesting that in the US, users are more concentrated in the eastern half than the western half. Lots of visitors too from Australia, which is awesome.

Of course, there are more QuickBooks users in the world than those who visit our forums, but this probably gives you an idea of concentrations. If you are trying to reach out to these users, we can help.

What do you think about the distribution of QuickBooks users around the globe?

2 Comments by Shannon Tucker on November 29, 2011
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Coldplay and QuickBooks

I heard an interview on XM Radio this week with Chris Martin and his cohorts in Coldplay.

Chris was talking about the challenge of creating really great music. He told the interviewer that his songwriting was influenced by the Beatles, Bob Marley, Nirvana. Their music, he said, was quite simple to play on the guitar — a 12 year old could play it — and yet was so well crafted.

Martin said, “Songs like that are easy to play, and impossible to write.”

That brought to mind something I heard once at a songwriting workshop: “Well-written songs are easy to learn and hard to forget.” Right on.

Now, to QuickBooks.

Good software should be, I think, like good songs. Easy to learn. Easy to play. Hard to forget. And almost impossible to create.

“Impossible to create” is a bit of an exaggeration, obviously. But it is hard to create a system that is intuitive to use, has a low learning curve, and sticks with you from one use to the next. That was Steve Jobs’ genius with the Mac, right?

I dabble in Pro Tools record studio software and also in PhotoShop. I find both of them hard to learn and easy to forget. CTRL/SHIFT/+ to toggle up the mixing console view??? What the heck.

I personally have found Microsoft Office products to be easy to learn and hard to forget. Maybe that’s just because I’ve been using them since way back in the last century. But there is a consistency and predictability to the user interface and controls that makes them pretty easy.

QuickBooks? Well, I think it’s in the middle there somewhere. It’s somewhat easy to learn if you have a bookkeeping/accounting background, and it is not chock-full of obscure ways to doing things. (Do you agree? Please comment below.)

Easy-to-use apps don’t come easy. The easier it is for the user, the harder it is for the designers and coders. The easiest thing for a development team is to just turn a bunch of programmers loose on the specs to make something happen asap. Judging from the end results, I don’t think Intuit usually does that.

Still, I’d like to see a version of QuickBooks appear sometime that is, I don’t know, a “classic” version, with far fewer features and options…just straight up general accounting for G/L, A/R, A/P, simplified Job Costing, and after the fact payroll. A system where you could put in a batch of cash-oriented transactions on one screen in one step, that would update the G/L, checking accounts, and customer/vendor/employee subaccounts all at one time.

Easy to learn; impossible to create? Maybe. Like a great Beatles song.

4 Comments by Shannon Tucker on November 18, 2011
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