We are resuming our Tip of the Week posts. Several emails came in saying people loved our tips so we're bringing them back. You ask, we deliver.
This week, it's all about Quickbooks. We use this program like a bunch of small businesses do as well. I depend on it and when it does not work, I get grumpy. Just ask my staff.
Solving two problems in one week made me decide to have this be our tip of the week. Hopefully you might find them helpful as well. By the way, these tips are for Quickbooks Desktop.
This tip I learned years ago. While in Quickbooks, click F2. This brings up a nifty product description page which can help point to possible issues - like file sizes.
What hit me this week was the "the Quickbooks user is already logged in." This happens more frequently than I like - but it's my own fault. After a long day, I "may" leave Quickbooks open instead of closing it like I should. Then the network "burps" or something happens on the server and the connection drops. Quickbooks still thinks I'm connected. The solution that works most of the time is to go into task manager, and close any task that has a QB as part of the filename. Or reboot the computer that is hosting Quickbooks, and if you have ever been around IT people or Finance people connected to a server hosting Quickbooks, you know that idea works as well as asking someone to donate their weekend to doing projects.
The other thing I ran into as a little different. Recently when I am in the Customer section, when I would lookup customers, I kept getting a "loading" message and a task bar. It might take 1 or 2 minutes - and this NEVER happened before. Well, Google to the rescue AGAIN. Turns out the Customer sort list can get wonky (technical term there) and you need to clear the Sort. Here's how you do that (and you can do this for Vendors, Products, etc.) Click on the View menu. Then click Re-Sort List with Customers. Presto, problem went away.
I hope you found these little tidbits helpful and remember to always go directly to Google to search for the problem and not to a vendor application website. Over the years, I have found the solution might be elsewhere.