WHAT TO DO WHEN YOUR QUICKBOOKS FILE IS RUNNING SLOW.

Your Wake Up Call.

If you view your QuickBooks file as a bucket you can picture what happens as your bucket fills.  Your bucket gets heavier and heavier thus slowing you down.  You could move up the Enterprise Solutions (software from Intuit - picture it as QuickBooks on steriods) or try "Cleaning Up Data".

If you click on "Help" in QuickBooks and search for "Cleaning Up Data" you will be presented a detailed instruction to clean up or compress your data.  I am not going to bore you with all of the details here.  So when you are ready to start the process go to this help page, print out all of topics, read each topic (at least once to be sure that you understand) then proceed.

There is something that is very important to the process that is not covered in the help topics.  Only transactions that have been "Cleared" will be cleaned up.  So to maximize your effort you will need to clear as many transactions as possible.  Hopefully, each month you are reconciling each of your bank accounts and credit card accounts (under the 'Help' icon you can search "reconcile an account) to get detailed information on how the reconcileation process works).

In the previouse paragraph I mentioned that you can reconcile bank an dcredit card accounts.  But, did you know that you can reconcile any Balance Sheet account (exceptions are Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable and Retained Earnings). 

Each time you reconcile an account you "Clear" transactions.  So if before you try "Cleaning Up Data" reconcile as many accounts as possible.

Now for an example:
Let's start with the Fixed Asset Account = Transportation Equipment.  Since there are only a few transactions each year you choose to reconcile the account at the end of each year (instead of monthly).
For each of the past five years you have replaced your Pizza delivery truck.

                                                            Transaction                  Balance

1. Purchased Truck #1                      $10,000                  $10,000
2. Purchased Truck #2                      $10,000
3. Sold Truck #1                              -$10,000                  $10,000
4. Purchased Truck #3                      $10,000
5. Sold Truck #2                              -$10,000                  $10,000              
6. Purchased Turck #4                      $10,000
7. Sold Truck #3                              -$10,000                 $10,000
8. Purchased Truck #5                      $10,000 
9. Sold Truck #4                              -$10,000                 $10,000
10.      Ending Balance                        $10,000

(The transactions above depict your account history for this account.)
 Now you can see that your ending balance is $10,000.  But to get to that balance you have nine Un-Cleared transactions.  If you reconcile this account the following happens:

1. In year #2 transactions #1 and #3 are cleared.
2. In year #3 transactions #2 and #5 are cleared
3. In year #4 transactions #4 and #7 are cleared
4. In year #5 transactions #6 and #9 are cleared

Leaving transaction #8 to make up the balance of $10,000.

Your account history after reconciling this account would appear as:

                                                           Transaction                  Balance

• Year One                                   $10,000                     $10,000
• Year Two                                  $          0                     $10,000  
• Year Three                                $          0                     $10,000   
• Year Four                                  $          0                     $10,000   
• Year Five                                   $          0                     $10,000  

Now instead of having nine transactions in our account history we only have five.

The process of "Cleaning Up Data" can not be reversed.  However, at the begining of the process you will be asked to backup your file (this backup becomes your safety net, here is where you can find the detail of cleared transactions if needed).  When completing your backup you will be asked to name the file.  To make it easy to identify the backup file from other backups name the new file "Old File 12 31 XX" (the "XX" would be the year end that was used to identify the the period that you cleand up).

You may want to consult your Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor for help in completing this process.

The End.