A Solution For Very Large Quickbooks Company Files

In the past few months I have had more than a few calls from QB customers or clients of my partners who have started experiencing severe problems associated with large QB Company files. The problems are usually slow performance, long running reports, QB freezing or crashing, and other similar issues. Last month I received yet another call from a QB Enterprise client with the same issues so I decided to take action.

It’s pretty well known that the QuickBooks Clean Up Data utility does very little in the way of reducing the size of a QB Company file. However, there are tools available from a QuickBooks developer in Texas named Q2Q. These tools allow you to create a much smaller file by summarizing past history and importing only relevant recent transactions. In particular the two tools are the Beginning Balance Transfer Utility and the Data Transfer Utility.

After meeting with the client to discuss their situation we agreed that I would attempt to reduce their file size by using these two tools and charge a very reasonable flat fee for the effort. This would give me the experience to confidently add this as a service offering to my business.

After purchasing and testing the two utility tools I went onsite two days ago to perform the work on the clients QBES file. The results were terrific.

The Beginning Balance Transfer Utility summarizes the Balance Sheet balances as of a specific date. In out case this was 12/31/2010. I took a couple of attempts because of data issues which were quickly fixed. That entire process took about an hour.

The Data Transfer Utility then allows you to transfer actual transaction activity for a specific date range from the source QB file to the new QB file. This is done in 4 “Passes” because transaction sequencing is important. Invoices must be in before Receive Payments, etc. These passes take some time since we were dealing with a large source file with MANY transactions. After the 4 passes were complete we had a few exceptions to correct.

The end result was that the two files Balance Sheets matched to the penny and the file size was reduced from 1.5GB to 70MB . . . . 95% reduction.

For companies with very large QB data files this is an excellent alternative to making the step to upgrade to a larger accounting package which will naturally have a big ticket price tag.

If you want to know more contact me at 888-972-9449.