Welcome to the Quickbooks Pro 14500 Club

If you use Quickbooks Pro, then you need to be aware that once your customer file contains 14,500 names then life, as you know it, is over. 14,500 names is not unreasonable. At my e-commerce site, http://www.HandicappedPets.com , I currently get between 20 and 50 orders a day.

20 orders x 365 days x 2 years = 14,600.

Quickbooks, under no circumstances, allows you to delete a customer record if there are, or were ever transactions attached. Neither the integrated "Clean Up Company Data Files" nor the "Make Inactive," "archive," or "Portable Company File" function will have any effect.


Quickbooks will tell you that the only solution is to upgrade to their Enterprise version for $3,000. 

• FREE: Download an evaluation version (merges up to 10 customers).
• Download the User Manual
  

Here's what you can do:

As you are probably in panic mode, wondering how to operate your business tomorrow, you can make room now, manually, in your customer file by MERGING unused customers.

Identify customers who are inactive and (in single user mode) change their Customer ID to "Retail" or something similar. Quickbooks will ask you if you want to Merge transactions, say "Yes." Do this a few hundred times and you'll have room for a hundred more customers.

Do this 7000 times and you no longer have any problem at all, except, perhaps, stubby fingers and old age.

Or - you can use the QuickBooks14500 solution script.

I've written a script which merges old or inactive customers into one customer record. All of the details of the sale are retained, but the customer information from the customer information screen (credit card, phone number, email) is lost. There is NO impact whatsoever on financial data. The customer address is retained because it was on the sales receipt or invoice. The down side: if you need to look up a receipt for an old customer, you'll have to have his invoice number... or keep a backup file in a separate company.

It's not bulletproof. I've tested it on a number of different systems and it has worked. A few people have reported problems that I've been able to solve. The script will NOT work if most of your customers have jobs or estimates. It will work if you have a few customers that each have hundreds of jobs or estimates. 

I also havea a version that Merges Vendors if you have thousands of those. 

Before using the script, you may need to make older customers inactive. You can do this with an excel command or access script I provide in the manual -- or I can do it for you at additional charge.

The script costs $75.00. No charge if it doesn't work for you. Order and pay by credit card through paypal. Within minutes you'll be emailed a download key and you'll be able to download the program. Alternately, call me and I'll email you the script.  Reach me at  The Energy Grid at (603) 791-4699.

Import Export

Don't miss the brilliant import export utilities for Quickbooks from John Magno at  BayStateConsulting.com . They solved the problem of getting data from my shopping cart into quickbooks:

• Without going into single user mode and
• Allowed me to import a 'group' type Assembly