How To Find a Company File In Quickbooks
Your company file is essentially the life blood of your Quickbooks account. It contains all of the information pertaining to your business’s accounting, including (but not limited to) payments received, payments sent, employee payroll, taxes, expenses, and more. If you want to access and use Quickbooks on another computer, you’ll need to transfer your company file to the new computer. But what if you are unable to locate your company file?
Quickbooks — like most programs and applications — has a default location in which it automatically stores users’ company file. Assuming you didn’t change this location, your company file “should” still be located here. Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows Vista users can access the default location by navigating to C:\Users\Public\Public Documents\Intuit\QuickBooks\Company Files. Windows XP users can access the default company file location by navigating to C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\(Shared) Documents\Intuit\QuickBooks\Company Files.
For Windows Xp users, you’ll notice the Company Files folder is a Shared Document. However, Quickbooks and Windows shows this folder as a Documents in the paths and addresses. So even though it is named as a Shared Document, no one else will be able to see it, unless you give them permission of course.
Hopefully, you can find your company file neatly tucked away in one of these default locations. If it’s not here, however, you can still find it, although it will take a few additional steps.
If you are running Windows 7, click the Start button followed by Search. If you are using Windows 8, scroll to the Chams bar in the upper-right-hand corner and click Search. Once you’ve opened the Search bar, enter the full or partial name of your company file. Here’s a tip for those of you who don’t remember what your company file name is: you can search for all files with a particular extension by entering the extension into the search bar. Being that company files use the .qbw extension, you should search for *.qbw, at which point Windows will reveal all files with the .qbw extension.
Qbw is an extension that’s used exclusively for Quickbooks, so this technique should find even the most well-hidden company files. Once you open it, try to remember where you save this time, or at the very least save an extra copy somewhere on your desktop.
Did this tutorial work for you? Let us know in the comments section below!