Quickbooks Pro 14500 Club

"You Can Check Out Anytime You Like, But You Can Never Leave"
"I just wanted to provide you with the link to the blog post I did today for our company's blog: http://www.divitaspeaks.com/ in which I talked about the Quickbooks 14500 club. I have happily decreased my customer master file by half - thanks to you and your wonderful program. Thanks again for your help." Benecia Beyer - Accountant DiVita & Associates, Inc. www.divitainc.com

If you use Quickbooks Pro, then you need to be aware that once your customer file contains 14,500 names then life, as you know it, is over. 14,500 names is not unreasonable. At my e-commerce site, http://www.HandicappedPets.com, I currently get between 20 and 50 orders a day.

20 orders x 365 days x 2 years = 14,600.

Quickbooks, under no circumstances, allows you to delete a customer record if there are, or were ever transactions attached. Neither the integrated "Clean Up Company Data Files" nor the "Make Inactive," "archive," or "Portable Company File" function will have any effect.

Quickbooks will suggest that you upgrade to Enterprise at huge expense. I'm not even ready to think about that and what impact that will have on my information system -- especially from a company that just said "Oops -- End of the Line -- Goodbye!"

Here's what you can do:

First, as you are probably in panic mode, wondering how to operate your business tomorrow, you can make room now, manually, in your customer file by MERGING unused customers.

Identify customers who are inactive and (in single user mode) change their Customer ID to "Retail" or something similar. Quickbooks will ask you if you want to Merge transactions, say "Yes." Do this a few hundred times and you'll have room for a hundred more customers. Do this 7000 times and you no longer have any problem at all, except, perhaps, stubby fingers and old age.

Second, there are some utilities that will allow you to:

A) Move all your data files to a new company
B) Move Beginning Balances as of the last day of last year (ex, 12/31/2005) to the new company.
C) Move all transactions after the date in B) to the new company.
D) Delete all customer records with no transactions. As transactions before 12/31/2005 were not moved, you'll be able to delete old customers.

These are available from Karl Irwin at http://www.q2q.us - more details on this process and the problems I had that lmade me give up are listed below.

Or - you can use the QuickBooks14500 simple solution...

I've written a script which merges old or inactive customers into one customer record. All of the details of the sale are retained, but the customer information from the customer information screen (credit card, phone number, email) is lost. There is NO impact whatsoever on financial data. The customer address is retained because it was on the sales receipt or invoice. The down side: if you need to look up a receipt for an old customer, you'll have to have his invoice number... or keep a backup file in a separate company.

It's not bulletproof. I've tested it on a number of different systems and it has worked. A few people have reported problems that I've been able to solve. The script will NOT work if you have jobs or estimates. Before using the script, you may need to make older customers inactive. You can do this with an excel command or access script I provide in the manual -- or I can do it for you at additional charge.

The script costs $75.00. No charge if it doesn't work for you. After placing your order, I will email you the script and the documentation. Please specify what version of Quickbooks you are using. Note: Google Mail will not accept zip attachments. You'll need to provide a valid email address (or call me and I'll provide alternate delivery.)

If you need to reach me , call me at The Energy Grid at (603) 791-4699.

Import Export

Don't miss the outstanding import export utilities for Quickbooks at QuickbooksExportImport.com. They solved the problem of getting data from my shopping cart into quickbooks (and allowed me to import the sale of a 'group' type assembly.

Karl Irwin's Utilities:

These utilities are brilliant, but this was not an easy process. Here are some of the problems I ran into -- then I gave up when I realized I could use this script.

File Transfer Utility:

Many of my data files would not transfer without a manual edit first. Manual edits included:

a. Duplicate Customer Names needed to be changed (I have no idea how they got in there in the first place)

b. Inventory Items without Account Numbers needed to be edited to reflect proper Sales, CGS, and Inventory Accounts. Again, these are anomalies that should not have gotten into the system in the first place).

Beginning Balance Transfer:

The beginning balances as of 12/31/2005 transferred correctly, but the balance sheet of the transferred company was way off from the balance sheet of the new company. This was caused by:

a. Inventory Values for Assemblies need to be made by manual adjustment.

b. It seems that the balance sheet was not properly reconciled at the end of 2005. The Accounts Payable and Inventory Valuation figures don't match the Detail report listings. I'm stuck here at the moment (Nov 2006) until my accountant comes in.

Transactions Transfer:

I've only taken the first step in the transactions transfer. Then I heard from the programmer that I needed to stop and reconcile my balance sheet first -- so I needed to start from scratch. The first stage of the Transaction transfer required that I go back through about 50 Sales Receipts I've processed because there is an entry in the description field of the receipt, but nothing in the Item column. This is where the person who took the order typed "Thank You For Your Order".

Other Problems:

The most frustrating part (to date -- I'm not finished yet) is that I got several program errors during the process that required that I restore from backup and start all over again through a 3 - 4 hour process. As best I can tell, the error was caused by having my Epson Stylus Photo R200 printer selected as the default printer. I wasn't even printing as it caused an application error.... The program would run through the long process, complete, the process, say "Outputting Report" then crash. Once I even shouted at it... but neither the computer nor the program seemed to care. It's most likely a Microsoft Access-Related problem, although I use Access all the time and it never complains.

The Program:

The program itself is written in compiled Microsoft Access. To run it you need to have Access or download the Run-Time module. I have Access. The menu's are cumbersome and not for the weak-of-heart, but navigable. I get the impression that he wrote this for his own use, then cleaned it up for distribution. It's focused on "function" not "form" as well it should be.

Program Vendor:

The program vendor, Karl Irwin, has been extremely helpful and responded to ALL of my dumb questions.

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