New Blog

As I have mentioned on several occasions, the key to good tax and financial planning is good records. We in the tax profession can only do so much with what we are given by our clients. GIGO - Garbage In, Garbage Out. We have long required our business clients to keep their books using the QuickBooks programs, either on their own or with the assistance of outside bookkeeping professionals.

One of the most time consuming aspects for working on tax returns is cleaning up the QB data so that it provides what we need. This is the case with many professional bookkeepers, as well as people who do their own entry work. I am planning to post copies of many of the tips I send to other QB users on this new blog. I am also hoping to be able to post short mini videos that show how certain tasks are done.

I have to admit that one of the reasons I decided to set up a new separate blog for this topic was so that I could have a chance to play with the new features that the Blogger service has developed which are not available on my old style blog, such as the poll on the right side.

QB Data Conversion

I recently took a survey for QuickBooks on their new Client Solution Center as part of their Certified ProAdvisor program.  While I like their new data conversion tool that allows people to import data from Peachtree, Microsoft Small Business Accounting and Microsoft Office Accounting, it does have a serious limitation, which I explained as follows in the request for additional feedback.

Your conversion tool should include the ability to convert from the QB Online format to the QB desktop format.  I have always advised against using your online service because of the inability to do this, and will continue to advise against your online service until it is possible to easily move data from the online program to the desktop one.

 

 

Working On QB With Multiple Computers

Q:

Subject: transferring data


I use Quickbooks Pro 2005 and just got dsl at home. I have it on my work computer also and want to transfer data to my home computer via the internet. Can I transfer the data on the internet, I have been using pcAnywhere to transfer via phone line, but it takes forever. Thanks for any information.

A:

I assume you are wanting to access your QB data from both your home and work computers. Trying to do that over the internet is going to be a slow and messy process. Even the official online QB service, which is designed for this kind of direct access, is much too slow for my tastes; one of my many complaints about the online service.

What you need to do is work with the QBW file directly on each computer. This will require that after each time you work in the file, from either computer, you backup the data into a compressed QBB file. There are several ways for you to do this and have access to the QBB file from both of your computers.

One way would be to backup the QBB file onto a portable storage medium, such as a CD-RW disc or thumb flash drive, which you can carry with you back and forth between home and work. You would then restore the data onto the computer you are using.

Another way, and the one we use with most of our clients, is to store the QBB file on an online storage service, such as XDrive or MyDocsOnline. You download a copy of the latest QBB file to the computer you are working on and restore it into your QB program and then work on it all you want. When you're done, you make a new QBB copy that you upload to your online storage. This gives you the speed of working on the file locally, with access to the data backup file from anywhere in the world.

These obviously aren't the only ways to work with a data file on multiple computers, but they are the ones that we have been using for several years.

Good luck. I hope this helps.

Kerry Kerstetter