QuickBooks and Your Business

an independent blog by quickbooksusers.com

Bear spray, QuickBooks, and your computer

When my family camped in Yellowstone National Park last month, we were camping in bear country.

Yellowstone grizzly bear

A clover-eating grizzly I photographed on the shore of Lake Yellowstone

Unfortunately, there have been some bad bear incidents in Yellowstone this summer.

A friend of mine let me borrow his bear spray for our trip. Bear spray is like personal-defense pepper spray, except it’s grizzly bear strength. I took the spray and packed it when we were on remote trails.

A warning on the can’s label almost made me laugh: “Don’t intentionally provoke a bear”. I could just visualize some nut feeling extra macho and confident with his can of bear spray and chasing a bear down in order to confront it, spray it, and earn some kind of moronic bragging rights.

To avoid bear problems, you are supposed to be careful to not leave food out, not to smell like food, not to surprise a bear, not to run away from a bear…the list goes on.

Bear spray is designed to be the last line of defense against bears.

My company provides data repair services for QuickBooks users, and those services could be considered the last line of defense against QuickBooks data problems. But they are not the only defense.

There are lots of things you can do to minimize the chance of having QuickBooks data problems in the first place:

  • Have battery backups on your server, your routers, and all your workstations
  • Have internet security software installed on all your computers
  • Keep Windows up to date on all your computers
  • Keep QuickBooks updated on your system
  • Use the same kind of networking equipment on all your workstations
  • Make regular backups to a location off of your server

If you do these things, you greatly minimize the chance of encountering data problems in QuickBooks in the first place. But we’ll be your bear spray if somehow it ever gets to that point.

No Comments by Shannon Tucker on September 2, 2010
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11 things I love and hate about Twitter

I haven’t had my B2B Twitter account for terribly long, but I’ve had it long enough to know what I like and don’t like about it.

Likes:

  • Making connections with people in my profession and market.
  • Getting a real-time view of the sentiment and perceived needs of my market
  • Learning about software, leadership, marketing, and technology. And other random stuff too.
  • Finding new business partners, blog partners, customers, friends.
  • Making money. Twitter results in revenue that we otherwise wouldn’t have.
  • Helping people when I can.
  • Following and being followed by people who are interesting, communicative, and who personally engage. My tweeps…I love ‘em!
  • Putting a face on my company’s services a bit. When your specialty is QuickBooks data, that could maybe seem a little dry.

Dislikes:

  • Anything automated about Twitter follows. I experimented with autofollowing for awhile, but don’t do it anymore. It seemed fake and unable to actually help with any of my social media goals. Automated following and unfollowing leaves me cold.
  • Generic DMs. I respond to a real DM. I ignore automated, generic ones. One step away from spam, in my book.
  • The Twitter fail whale. Don’t understand it. Why wouldn’t a server system upgrade solve this immediately? I saw the fail whale earlier today. Why does Twitter let fail whale mode keep going on and on?

How about you? What do you like and not like about Twitter?

2 Comments by Shannon Tucker on August 24, 2010
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How-NOT-to Guide for Using QuickBooks

Here are the quickest ways — the shortcuts — to running into trouble with QuickBooks:

  1. Get a business owner — not a professional bookkeeper or accountant — to set up the books. This is like a business owner who is not in the construction business pouring their own concrete and putting in their office plumbing themselves. You can maybe do it, but you probably won’t do it that well, and it’s hard to undo/redo it later.
  2. Postpone reconciling…for months. Sometimes it’s a headache to reconcile your bank accounts and credit card accounts. And who likes a headache? If you put off reconciling for another day, then your reports won’t be accurate and you create an even bigger headache later on.
  3. Don’t backup your data; assume that your computer hardware and software will always be healthy. Assume that because QuickBooks is working great today, it will be fine tomorrow as well. Take a gamble…what’s the worst that could happen? You can always fork out a few hundred to get your data repaired.
  4. Entrust everything to one person. Bookkeeping fraud and embezzlement is what happens to the other guy, right? Have only one set of eyes on the books, the one person who receives and pays the bills, supervises payroll, writes checks, reconciles the books, and prepares the financials. That’s a shortcut to white collar crime in your office.

Anything else to put on the how-not-to list?

No Comments by Shannon Tucker on August 19, 2010
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QuickBooks networking problems? Diagnose with the free tool

Intuit has a free, downloadable tool to help diagnose and troubleshoot connectivity and multi-user issues. The QuickBooks Connection Diagnostic Tool can help solve certain 6000 errors and H202 and H505 errors.

Their tool is compatible with QuickBooks 2008, 2009, and 2010 versions (for Enterprise Edition users, versions 8, 9, and 10.) It works under Windows 7, Vista, and XP.

Learn about and download the tool here.

No Comments by Shannon Tucker on August 12, 2010
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Wifi in the wilderness

My family was in Yellowstone National Park last week, and we needed to find a wifi hotspot so that my daughter could log in and add some college classes to her fall class schedule.

We saw this and went to the Visitor Center with our laptop:

yellowstone wifi?

Only one problem. That little graphic sign doesn’t mean wifi.

It means amphitheatre.

Low tech. A place for non-digitized presentations on plants, animals, rocks, the Shoshone tribe, and Wyoming natural history.

I felt a little silly.

But then again, maybe it would be silly to have wifi in the middle of a historic national park like Yellowstone. Come on, Yellowstone is about nature! A place to which we flee our technology culture.

So it’s cool with me that there was an amphitheatre instead of a hotspot. But maybe they should change their sign.

[Actually, Yellowstone sits on top of a huge geothermal phenomenon called a hotspot, which powers Old Faithful, the Black Dragon's Lair and all the other thermal wonders of the park. But of course that kind of hotspot is about hot lava under the ground rather than internet access above it.]

No Comments by Shannon Tucker on August 11, 2010
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5 QuickBooks Online Tutorials

Cathy Iconis, CPA, has assembled a list of five free online tutorials for QuickBooks Online.

  1. How to bill a customer
  2. How to get paid
  3. How to make a deposit
  4. How to write checks
  5. How to use online banking

Check it out: QuickBooks Online Tutorials (PDF)

Know of any other good online resources for learning QBO?

No Comments by Shannon Tucker on August 10, 2010
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Why you should backup all your license keys and install codes today

“I’m using an old version of QuickBooks, and my hard drive died today. QuickBooks won’t give me the install codes – they say they don’t support my version anymore, and I have to upgrade. But I don’t want to upgrade! I just want to reinstall my old version.”

I have this conversation with users all the time. And it’s a shame. The solution would have been simple if they had only backed up their license keys and install codes.

This isn’t just about QuickBooks. It’s about any software you use that comes with registration/installation codes and keys.

The simple fix?

1. Make sure that you keep your license keys/codes with your original install CD. Write it on a label and stick it on the jewel case with the install CD. If you downloaded your software, see #2.

2. Create a document that contains your license keys. It could be just a Word or text file. Whenever you install new software, update the file with a new line that has your software’s name and version plus any registration keys or codes.

With QuickBooks 2010, you had to call Intuit directly on the phone to get a ‘verification’ number that was needed to complete the software registration. Make sure you keep that number with your other registration info.

Make sure that your registration information file is either backed up to an online backup service, or is an online document in the first place (like a Google Docs file.)

Why backup your license keys? Because before you know it, your software vendor won’t give them to you anymore. So take ten minutes and do this. Then, when the day comes and you need to reinstall your old software, you won’t need to panic or call anyone. You’ll just grab your keys and go.

10 Comments by Shannon Tucker on July 30, 2010
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Offer New QuickBooks Data Services to Your Clients

Are you a…

  • QuickBooks ProAdvisor
  • QuickBooks Advanced Certified ProAdvisor
  • Intuit Marketplace Developer
  • IT consultant

You might qualify to become a QuickbooksUsers.com Referral Partner.

We team up with selected individuals and companies in the U.S. and around the world to offer critical QuickBooks data services to their client bases. It means more billable income for you, and a competitive advantage; extremely few organizations offer the tech services you could be offering.

Join us to refer/resell specialized QuickBooks data services like QuickBooks database repair, supercondensing, and edition downgrades.

One of our international referral partners says this:

“We’re glad to have signed up as your referral partner to offer QuickBooks file repair services to our customer base in Asia. The responses we get from you, so far, have been excellent. The first job assignment was well done. We were able to return the repaired file to the client the next working day, minimizing their down time. We will be promoting your services in our region.”

Partner with us today! Apply online.

No Comments by Shannon Tucker on July 30, 2010
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Survey Results: What Frustrates QuickBooks Users?

We asked our QuickBooks User News subscribers about what frustrated them about QuickBooks. They spoke! There seemed to be a pattern to what was considered painful about using QuickBooks. The biggest issues?

  • Version issues: Forced upgrades, lack of compatibility between versions, upgrade cost
  • Reporting issues: Limitations in ability to customize
  • Performance issues: Too slow to load and run
  • Integration issues: Difficulty with imports
  • Marketing issues: Intuit overzealous to upsell/cross-sell
  • Training & usability issues: Too difficult for some non-accountants to use

The good news is that Intuit is constantly enhancing their product. QuickBooks 2011 is in beta testing now. We’ll let you know what’s new soon. Hopefully some of the ‘pain points’ in QuickBooks will have been addressed.

Is your ‘issue’ on this list?

9 Comments by Shannon Tucker on July 29, 2010
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Supercondensing…Put Your QuickBooks File on a Diet

Is your QuickBooks file too big, sluggish, slow? Did it use to be lean and quick but now has a paunch?

As you use QuickBooks over the years, the transactions build up more and more. For transaction-heavy businesses, this results in large data files that take longer and longer to update in real-time across a network. As a result, it can take QuickBooks many seconds to post a new invoice or run a report.

Archiving data in QuickBooks has two disadvantages:

1. You lose historical reporting ability
2. It often does not really trim down the size of the file, especially if you track inventory in QuickBooks.

The answer? Supercondense your data. We invented this process, and it can result in a 50% or more reduction in your QBW file size, and faster QuickBooks performance on your network.

Instead of removing transactions from your data, we remove the audit trail and do some other housecleaning on the file. None of your transactions, accounts, or balances change. But your data file gets lean and mean.

We can analyze your file for free and let you know how much we can shrink it. No obligation. Contact us today at 1-800-999-9209 to schedule your analysis.

2 Comments by Shannon Tucker on July 29, 2010
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