QuickBooks 2010: The Missing Manual

Chapter 7. Managing QuickBooks Files

When company ledgers were made of paper, you had to be careful not to tear the pages or spill coffee on them. Today’s electronic books require their own sort of care and feeding. Protecting your QuickBooks files is essential, not only because your books tell the financial story of your company, but because computers are notorious for chewing up data in all sorts of ways.

QuickBooks files have a few advantages over their paper-based relatives. Most importantly, you can make copies of your company files for safekeeping. (QuickBooks can also create a special copy of your company file so you and your accountant can both work on it at the end of the year; see Sharing the Company File with Your Accountant to learn how.) If several people work on your QuickBooks file simultaneously, you’ll learn when and how to switch from multi-user mode to single-user mode so you can perform the file housekeeping tasks that require dedicated access. This chapter focuses on the most important things you can do with your QuickBooks files: backing up and copying them. It also explains why and how to verify, condense, and delete your files, which you’ll do less often, if ever.

Switching Between Multi-User and Single-User Mode

In QuickBooks, some maintenance tasks require that only one person have access to the company file. For these tasks, you change a company file to single-user mode. You have to be in single-user mode to merge or delete accounts and items, export data ...