QuickBooks 2011: 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 they tell the financial story of your company, but also 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 them 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 a 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 housekeeping tasks that require dedicated access. This chapter focuses on the most important things you can do with your QuickBooks files: back up and copy 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- and Single-User Mode

In QuickBooks, some maintenance tasks require that only one person have access to the company file. If you tell QuickBooks to set up your company file in multi-user mode when you create it, you have to change to single-user mode for these tasks. You have to be in single-user ...