When the QuickBooks File Has Gotten Too Large
You have checked and found that your QuickBooks file has gotten too large. What to do now?
Normally, this can be the sign of some transactions not being posted properly or not being setup properly. Here are a few examples of what we’ve seen.
1. An exceptionally large number of inventory items. These can be quite a hog for resources on the QuickBooks system. Inventory items may have been created for things that really were not inventory items or for a one time thing related to a particular special order for a customer. In each case, it could be better setup without the inventory item.
2. Unbilled job costs not cleared out. Unbilled job costs not cleared out can also keep the file getting quite large. Make sure you go through the MBO job cost periodically and close those out.
3. Large number of other items, such as customers. When the customer numbers might have, a lot of them may be no longer active. You should go through and purge out any customer items.
4. Not running the archiving function. QuickBooks has a utility, which will archive the data after yearend. You probably don’t need to keep one or two years of full detail. Running that program can help you greatly consolidate your file size.
5. Posting too much detail into the QuickBooks. Just ‘cause it’s there doesn’t mean you should necessarily have to post every small transaction. I had a client that was posting a lot of $2.00 or $3.00 types of transactions with customers. That was really increasing the number of transactions on the system. They’d been better off just posting summary information, such as daily sales, rather than putting in the full detail by very small amounts by customer.
When your QuickBooks is performing sluggishly and you have a very large file, check some of the above items. You probably need to bring in a certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor (I am one), who might find some other causes as well.
I understand, but how large does the database become before we have to worry about the possibility of slowing QuickBooks 2007 Premier on a network with 5 users? Currently we have 100 meg database and growing fast.
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It can depend on the speed of your network. The installations that I have seen that have worked pretty slow are the ones that have been in the 300 meg plus range. On some networks you might start to feel it at 150 megs or more.
One way to tell is how long does it take you to run reports. If you have to wait more than 10 seconds, it could be a sign you need to slim down.
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Thanks Jon. I just never had seen a general guideline for database size.
The network here at work is 100 Mbp and the Server just handles storage QuickBooks is the only database it is running other than a few Excel files and Word Docs. It runs fine, not fast but the bottle neck is coming from P 700 MHz clients.
I used to work for a law firm who billed by 1/10 of an hour for everything imaginable and would kill the network when someone opened ten, 50 page PDFs that was stored on the server! I think it started an unintentional Denial of Service attack on the server/network and locked the network up for about 10 minutes. It was kind of funny when looking back at it. Now I am back in college and out of that mess. Last time I will ever work for a Lawyer!
Thanks for your input!
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