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After spending some time in Quickbooks, you may come across a tool called “Condense Data Utility.” If you’re a newcomer to Quickbooks, you’re probably wondering just what in the world this tool does and how to use it. In an effort to shed light on this topic, we’re going to reveal everything you need to know about the Condense Data Utility in this blog post.

The Condense Data Utility is designed to reduce the total size of your company file by condensing closed transactions into journal entries and removing unnecessary elements from lists. It’s not uncommon for company files to exceed over 1GB in file size. And conventional wisdom should tell you that large files are slower and take longer to access/back up, which his where the Condense Data Utility comes into play. It reduces the company file size, thereby improving speed and overall performance.

It’s important to note that there’s no “undo” option for the Condense Data Utility. Once you’ve condensed your company file, there’s no turning back. So before jumping head first into this tool, it’s recommended that you evaluate your company file to determine whether or not it’s needed. See below for a list of common reasons to use the Condense Data Utility:

• You are approaching a list limit.
• Your company file is too large to back up in a reasonable amount of time.
• Quickbooks is running unusually slow.
• You have exhausted all other avenues of improving the performance of Quickbooks (e.g. hardware upgrade, Cloud management, increasing resources, starting a new company file).

To run the Condense Data Utility, select File from the main menu followed by Utilities and Condense Data. This will bring up the Wizard, which walks you through the steps to running the Condense Data Utility. If you need help during this process, click the Help button within the Wizard for a list of help topics and answers. During the initial setup, you’ll be asked to specify the lists that you wish to clean up. Feel free to choose any lists that you believe are large and problematic. When you are finished with the setup, click the Begin Condense button to initiate the process. There’s no turning back once you click the Begin Condense button, so make sure everything is correct.