Blog

From customer records to years of purchase invoices and transactions, the average Quickbooks file contains a lot of data. Failing to clean up your company file could result in it becoming too large to reasonably move back and forth between different storage devices. Thankfully, however, you can make your Quickbooks company file smaller by performing some routine maintenance on it.

Condense Your Data

Quickbooks has a built-in utility program for shrinking the company file size. To access this program, go to File > Utilities > Condense Data. This tool deletes unnecessary data, which in turn reduces the overall file size. Before using Quickbooks Condense Data tool, you should familiarize yourself with its functions.

One of the features of the Condense Data tool is the ability to delete transactions before a specific date. If your company is new, or if you’ve only been using Quickbooks for a short period of time, this option may not offer much help in terms of shrinking your file size down. If you have years worth of data in Quickbooks, though, this tool will certainly help in reducing your company file size.

The Condense Data tool also offers the option to delete all data within the Quickbooks account while preserving lists, preferences and service subscriptions. Enabling this option is a highly effective way to free up space in your company file while keeping vital information that may be used at a later time.

A third function of the Condense Data tool is to delete all transactions while simultaneously creating a “period copy” (note: this option is currently only offered with Quickbooks Accountant version). Basically, this option allows users to create condensed company files which only includes transactions within a specified time period. In doing so, users can easily shrink their company file size while only sending data that’s relevant to the client.

Note: Quickbooks automatically creates an archive copy of your company file before engaging the Condense Data tool. Should you ever need access to information that was deleted with this tool, you can access it in the archives.

Using the Condense Data tool is a highly effective way to reduce your company file size by getting rid of unnecessary data. With that said, it’s important for users to check and make sure they do not need any of the data mentioned above before using the tool. Quickbooks does produce an archive of the file before condensing, but it’s better to only use the tool if you no longer need the data.