While Everyone agrees that a large quickbooks file poses performance issues, it’s often difficult to cut down the size. The various option for trimming the filesize are
- Verify and Rebuilt
- Save file as Accountant’s version and restore it.
- Clean up company data prior to a date.
What if none of these work for you. We had a company file the size of 800MB that was a result of 6 years of data. We not only had performance issues but also the reports were inconsistent. when several rebuilds didn’t help, we realized it was time to split the file.
Strangely the Clean up company data didn’t work for it. It would always be stuck halfway. The only way out was to create a new company file and transfer the data.
The Utility that came to rescue was from http://www.q2q.us . We used 3 utilities
- Beginning balance transfer utility. (PAID)
This utility helps you transfer the begning balance. - Data Transfer utility (PAID)
This utility transfers your lists and transactions - Add reference number to bills (Free)
If you don’t use unique reference numbers for your transactions, this will be helpful.
The utilities make it easy for you to transfer the data, but it’s still a herculean job to transfer the data. It took us 3 weeks to transfer, reconcile and repost the 2 years data.
here are a few mistakes that I made. I hope it would save you weeks of trouble if you decide to tranfer quickbooks data using these utilities
- Before you start importing data into your new file, import all the custom templates you may have in your old file. the utilities will not transfer the templates for you. If the templates do not exist in the new file and there is a transaction that uses the template, you will get transfer error.
- The utility can’t transfer inventory adjustments/stock adjustments from quickbooks file to quickbooks file. You must export the inventory adjustments to iif file and then import into your new file
- For us it failed to transfer several deposits. It could be just us, it may work for you. But it took us a while to reconcile and realize that the deposits were not transferred. If your bank balance are not matching, look for the deposits that were not transferred
- Pay special attention to deposited funds. Refer to the transfer strategies to learn more about this.
- Learn vlookup. Without this, it would be impossible to reconcile. We had nearly 25 pages of transactions under 1 account head and reconciling without exporting to excel and using Vlookup would be impossible.
- If your reference numbers are not unique, you can’t use Vlookup. In that case, use CONCATENATE to join several fields and get a unique key.
I wish that after paying so much for quickbooks, they had included a utility for easy transfer of data from one file to another. Thanks God that there are other third party utilities available to do the job.