If your QuickBooks company file gets flippin’ big, it can start to slow you down. Invoices take a while to save. Reports take minutes to generate. Maybe QuickBooks randomly crashes.
What can you do? One classic approach is to recreate your file. A recreated file is started from scratch. Then you add in to it as much data as you need for it to be current and usable. Some companies do this as a regular procedure every three to five years.
How do you do it? First, you have to decide on a cutoff date for your new file.
The cutoff date represents the point in time at which you want to bring transactions and balances from your old file into your new file. The cutoff date is usually the end of a fiscal year.
Here are the general steps to recreate a company file:
- Create a new company file in QuickBooks
- Export from the old company, and import into the new company, all of your chart of accounts, customers, vendors, employees, inventory items and any other list items. If you want to clean up your lists, you can do so in Excel in between the export and import steps.
- Edit customers and complete their credit card number. QuickBooks only transfers the last 4 digits.
- In the new company, bring over all the open or pending accounts receivable and accounts payable transactions as of the cutoff date. The transactions you add in to your new company can be manually entered, or you can buy and use 3rd party utilities that can export and import certain kinds of transactions.
- Input all the outstanding checks and deposits for all your bank accounts
- Input all balance sheet and profit & loss year-end figures as of the cutoff date and verify that they are the same as in old set of books; make needed adjustments
- Input all outstanding sales orders, purchase orders and estimates
- Input all transactions entered after the cutoff date: invoices, credit memos, sales receipts, credit card receipts, bills, bill payment checks, checks, transfers, receive payments, deposits, and vendor credits
- Recreate all payroll checks
- Recreate all employees’ personal data — assign their earnings, taxes and deductions
- Set up each employee’s year-to-date earnings, tax deductions, loan repayments
- Reset all government tax forms and sales tax payments
- Set up beginning balance inventory figures
- Adjust and re-reconcile all inventory after all data is imported
- Remove any inactive customers, vendors, chart of accounts, items
- Re-link credits, vendor credits and payments
- Re-reconcile all bank accounts and credit card accounts
- Re-reconcile all income accounts, expense accounts, asset accounts and liability accounts
- Re-reconcile A/P and A/R
- Recreate memorized reports
- Recreate memorized transactions
- Recreate templates
- Make sure everything balances to the last balance sheet from the old file and make any necessary adjusting entries
- Set up users and privileges
- Verify and rebuild the file; make sure there are no errors
Complicated? A bit. Time-consuming? Yep. But sometimes you don’t have a choice — you have to take action — things can’t go on as they have.
It’s better to plan and execute a company recreate before it’s an emergency.
Need help? We can do the whole process for you turnkey, without downtime on your side. Click for information.
Have you ever recreated your file? How did it go?
I need further information on some of the steps in this article.
Under step 4, where do you buy the “3rd party utilities to export/import certain kinds of transaction”?
Under steps 5, 6, 7, and 8, it says to “Input all”, is this done automatically when the company is recreated or is this done manually?
Under step 16, what is involved to “Re-link”?
I hope to hear from you soon. Thanks!
You can find import/export tools here.
No, those steps don’t happen automatically. They represent processes you do either manually or with some help from import/export utilities.
Relinking refers to applying credits and payments to the right invoices.
I’m still laughing.
…or crying! It’s not a trivial undertaking. But a QuickBooks user had asked me for a list of the steps, so I thought I’d put one out there that represents at least for how we go about it.
I see…
It’s basically starting a new company with a fresh start-up balances…
Nice idea. I should apply this to one of the companies im handling.
Thanks Shannon.
You’re welcome Jack. If you undertake the process, please let us know afterwards how it went for you.
If your QuickBooks company file gets flippin’ big, it can start to slow you down. Invoices take a while to save. Reports take minutes to generate. Maybe QuickBooks randomly crashes. What can you do? One classic approach is to recreate your file. A recreated file is started from scratch. Then you add in to it as much [...]
Aloha ka kou,
I would like to create a new file for 2011, my question is regarding Quickbooks Bill payment which is done online. How do I transfer this service to the new file? Is this possible?
Mahalo Nui!
Carol
Aloha, Carol! I wish I was in Hawaii this week…but in regard to your question, you reactivate your online bill payment service in the new file and you’re good to go.
Aloha Shannon,
Thanks for the quick response. When you say activate, what specific steps do I take? Yes, you should visit Hawaii. There are many things to explore on our lovely islands.
Mahalo plenty,
Carol
Carol, I don’t use that service so I don’t know exactly. But it should be the same as if you were interfacing your QB file to the bill payment service for the first time. Probably entering in your bill payment account login details into the right place in QB.
I’ve been to the Big Island twice…loved it! Hope to see some of the other islands sometime.
Shannon,
You can visit many times and not see all the wonders. Check out the website: instanthawaii.com
I went on adventures with these guys and they know more about the island than me.
Aloha,
Carol
Mahalo, Carol! That’s an awesome website. It would be great to get back there sometime soon.
Shannon
Shannon,
I currently use QB Enterprise 2008. We also use the payroll service within this software. At the end of this month the payroll will no longer be supported in this 2008 release. They want us to upgrade to 2011 for $2100.00 but I want to go back to QB Pro (it was probably a mis-step to go to Enterprise in the first place). However, I’m told that Enterprise and Pro use different database engines. So I cannot downgrade my Enterpeise QB company file.
Question: Do you know of a tool that will transfer the data to from 2008 Enterpeise to 2011 Pro? Or should I just create a new company file?
Followup Question: If you don’t know of a good tool and recommend creating a new company file for 2011 Pro, can I export lists and transactions etc. from Enterprise 2008 to Excel .csv and then into 2011 Pro without any problems. Is this just a matter of getting the fields defined properly?
I don’t know of a tool to do that, but we offer it as a service.
Otherwise, you can export your lists into Excel and then import them into a QB Pro new company file. To get the transactions over, you can use third party tools to bring over most of them.
If it’s just a one-time thing, it’s probably most cost-effective to let us do it for you.
It seems to me that you’re going all the way around your elbow to get back to your thumb. You’re also banging your head against a wall the whole time you’re making the trip.
Why not just clean up your data, compressing transactions into summary data from the beginning of your company data to a date that you specify? If your data is good and balances are good, why in the world do you want to create a new file??? This compression is the way that Quickbooks has designed in it to drastically reduce the size of the company file without having to start over. Obviously, you need to create a backup of the company file that you can use if you ever need to review details of transactions, but if you always keep the current year plus the preceding 2 or 3 years of data, you will almost always have all you need handy. I am at a total loss to understand why you’d say you need to create a new company file to trim your data down.
Hi Dennis, I assume that you are referring to the Clean Up Company command that is built in to QuickBooks, which is the current version of the old archive/condense commands. Have you tried it? Did it bring your file size down significantly? I talk to people all the time who say they ran the command and it only reduced the file size by 5 or 10%, especially if you have inventory items. Theoretically, it should do as you say, but in reality, the outcome is pretty different.
#9. Why do you have to recreate payroll checks if you are doing a YTD entry?