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Use QuickBooks’ “Clean Up Company Data” feature to condense the past years.
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If you decided to try to decrease the size of your file, you have 3 options: Don’t bother asking Intuit because they have an incentive to get you upgraded to Enterprise. Getting a second opinion from an expert is not a bad idea at that stage, just because of the cost involved. I recommend that you first try a cleanup, because Enterprise represents a significant jump in price from Pro or Premier. If you have reached the limit on number of items, you can try to cleanup the items that you don’t use anymore (see more on this below), but if it doesn’t have a sufficient impact, Enterprise might be your best option.
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What can you do? First and foremost, you need to decide if you maxed out QuickBooks Pro and Premier and you need to upgrade to Enterprise. Let’s assume that you reached the conclusion that your file is too big. Shrinking the size of your QuickBooks file For more details on the limits per item type, refer to this table: Hit F2 when you are in QuickBooks and it will give you a count of all your items. Above these limits, you need to get more granular and look at your individual items types. The same number is 100,000 for Enterprise. Here’s a good rule of thumb to use: if your total number of items is below 10,000 overall, you’re safe with QuickBooks Pro and Premier. This limit is different for each type of item and for each version of QuickBooks and it changes year to year, so it’s a hard target to keep track of. There is a limit to the number of list items (classes, customers, jobs, classes, etc.) that you can have in your file. Above these limits, QuickBooks becomes painfully slow and the database tends to get corrupted easily. QuickBooks Enterprise starts straining at around 1GB. Theoretically, there is no limit to the size of your file, but in practicality, assume that you are stretching QuickBooks Pro and Premier when you get to around 150MB. You may have a small file in term of the amount of space it takes on your hard drive and still reach a limit based on how you use QuickBooks. You can hit a ceiling based on the sheer size of the file (defined in megabytes, or MB) or by what’s in the file itself (e.g. The definition of “too large” in QuickBooks is fuzzy. How can you tell when “large is too large” and what can you do about it? Many businesses come to a point when their QuickBooks file has become too large. When your QuickBooks file has become too largeįrom Patrick Bonnaure, founder of ProLedge Bookkeeping Services
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