The notion of “spring cleaning” has been around for a long time. In the business accounting world generally and among QuickBooks users specifically, there are several forces that combine to make this a common time of the year for clean up. Financial and tax reporting requirements cause business owners and accountants to take a closer look at their accounting systems after closing the books on the just completed year. For QuickBooks users, Intuit’s service discontinuation policy also comes into play. For QuickBooks 2007 users, the lights on Intuit’s online services will go dark on May 31, 2010, forcing users that need these services to upgrade.
QuickBooks includes a powerful utility to help with the clean up process: the Clean Up Company Data utility. Running this utility is a great way to grab some important benefits:
- improve QuickBooks performance by reducing the size of the company file
- improve efficiency by reducing the number of list entries QuickBooks users have to scroll through
- reduce the chance of assigning a transaction to the wrong list item
Company file size has a big impact on performance in QuickBooks. If you’re running QuickBooks Pro or Premier and your company file is much bigger than 100 Mb, it’s time you investigated the Clean Up Company Data utility. If your QuickBooks lists are filled with stale entries, you’re wasting time on every transaction reaching the right list entry and increasing the risk you choose the wrong one. The time waste and risk is small on each individual transaction, but multiply that over thousands of transactions per year. The costs and the risk of even a few erroneous transactions can become material.
To help get you started on running the Clean Up Company Data utility, we’ve posted 2 new articles in our KnowledgeBase.
The first article is an overview of what the Clean Up Company Data utility does, and the second covers the effects of running the Clean Up Company Data utility.
It’s never to late to get a jump on your spring cleaning.
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Does QB Enterprise have the clean up utility? I can’t seem to find it.
If not, what is the recommended alternative?
Thank you.
Yes, it does, but it looks like we need to update this article, especially for QB 2013 and ES 13.0. It’s now found under Files->Utilities->Condense Data…
Starting with QB 2012 and ES 12.0, the clean-up functions took on more power, so you should see better results than prior versions. Of course, always have a good backup before you begin.