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QuickBooks Pro Limitations Explained

May 30, 2016 by Wayne Schulz

Are you thinking about purchasing QuickBooks but unsure whether you can fit within the product’s limits? Not sure what those limits are?

Are you a QuickBooks users wondering when your company will hit the limitations build into the Intuit accounting system?

Luckily Intuit publishes the limitations of QuickBooks Pro on their website so that you can review them ahead of time to decide whether your company will fit into the capabilities of QuickBooks Pro.

First, consider that overall QuickBooks is designed for companies with under 20 employees and less than 2 million dollars of annual revenues. That doesn’t mean it won’t work for larger companies. It only means that the typical QuickBooks users are within these parameters. Companies that are expecting to grow beyond these capabilities might consider starting with a more robust accounting system to avoid a migration as the company grows.

Intuit provides some guidance for determining if your company will fit within their product limitations:

QuickBooks is designed for small businesses with 20 or fewer employees and annual revenue of less than two million dollars. The ideal use of QuickBooks is to keep at least two years of detailed transactions in a company data file so that you can run comparative reports and have prior-year project information.

The rate of growth of QuickBooks company data files varies significantly from company to company. There is no “average” or “typical” data file size, since businesses track different information. How quickly a file grows depends on the number of transactions, the amount of information entered per transaction, and the number of “links” per transaction.

For example, someone who enters 500 1-line invoices per month might find that their data file is smaller than another person who enters 100 5-line invoices per month, while someone who usually receives five separate payments per invoice would have a larger file than someone who typically receives only one payment per invoice.

To estimate if QuickBooks is right for your small business, take the average number of monthly transactions (remember, an invoice, payment, and deposit would be three separate transactions, and a bill and bill payment would count as two), and multiply by 2 KB to determine how much the data file will grow each month.

For example, if your company enters an average of 300 transactions per month, your data file could grow 600 KB per month (300 x 2 KB = 600 KB), or 7200 KB per year (600 KB x 12 = 7200 KB). If the annual data file size is less than 15,000 KB, then QuickBooks should be more than sufficient for your company. (Present QuickBooks users can check the size of their QuickBooks file by choosing Help > Product Information.)

One reason that Intuit talks about file size limitations is that many existing QuickBooks users could find reporting and speed of data entry gets much slower as the data files grow.

Here is a list of the limitations of field sizes within QuickBooks. The main issue with these limits could be the account number size which is restricted to only 7 characters.

Character Limitations for QuickBooks Fields

Here is another Intuit QuickBooks chart showing the limits on numbers of records. Note that while you may have up to 10,500 employees, vendors and customers individually, combined they cannot exceed 14,500 or you’ll be forced to migrate. Inventory limits may seem robust however growing companies – especially wholesale distributors – often carry a broad catalog of items from multiple suppliers. These items can easily grow to exceed 14,500.

Inventory limits may seem robust however growing companies – especially wholesale distributors – often carry a broad catalog of items from multiple suppliers. These items can easily grow to exceed 14,500.

Unfortunately, too many companies don’t consider these hard limitations before investing hours of labor into using QuickBooks for their statup.

Our recommendation:

If your company can fit within QuickBooks and you do not expect to grow within the next 5 years then you’re probably on the right path if you are investigating QuickBooks as an option.
If your company expects to grow past $2 million in revenues or will deal with more significant inventory capabilities and pricing then consider skipping the entry-level QuickBooks Pro and looking at alternatives. Your goal should be to avoid a migration in the future just as your company is growing rapidly and can least afford to interrupt their business processes.

To speak with us here at Schulz Consulting and discuss ways in which Sage 100 might be a better fit for your company, please use our contact form. Someone will call or email within 2 hours to discuss any questions.

QuickBooks Payroll Alive And Well

December 14, 2009 by Wayne Schulz

This morning I received a somewhat confusing email from my local Paychex representative. The subject line of “QuickBooks May Be Discontinued” caught my attention.

There was no message in the body of the email, however, attached was a graphic (see below) that stated QuickPayroll was being discontinued.

Sensing that something wasn’t right and that there’s no way that QuickBooks was going to be discontinued I contacted Intuit for their feedback.

As it turns out the notification, sent by my local Paychex representative, was only partially correct.

QuickBooks Payroll is not being phased out.

An older low-end version product called QuickPayroll is being discontinued in favor of any of Intuit’s other three payroll processing options.

With over 1.2 million payroll customers there’s a slim chance that Intuit’s going to turn their back on the payroll market. In July of 2009 Intuit actually increased their presence in the payroll market with a $170 million acquisition of Paycycle which also brought 85,000 additional small business payrolls under their arm.

Here is Intuit’s response:

Discontinuation of QuickPayroll

As of December 31, 2009, Intuit will discontinue its stand-alone QuickPayroll, a very basic payroll service that did not require the use of QuickBooks. We have notified the QuickPayroll customers (http://payroll.intuit.com/support/kb/kbitem/1012532.html) and have provided them with two offerings so that customers can continue their payroll services with Intuit. With its advertising,

QuickBooks Basic and Enhanced Payroll – payroll services that link to QuickBooks desktop
Intuit QuickBooks Assisted Payroll – payroll service in which Intuit handles the tax forms and payments; payroll integrates with QuickBooks desktop
Intuit Online Payroll – cloud-computing payroll service that runs stand-alone or integrates with QuickBooks desktop and QuickBooks Online.

So rest assured that QuickBooks and QuickBooks Payroll are both alive and well. While we don’t offer services on the Intuit product we wanted to provide this update for any users who might have received the same type of email with mis-information about the status of QuickBooks Payroll.

A full comparison of each option:

http://payroll.intuit.com/compare/compare-quickbooks-payroll.jsp

Quicken for Mac announced for February 2010 – pre-orders start October 2009

July 9, 2009 by Wayne Schulz

Intuit in a blog posting today announced the long awaited Quicken for Mac would be available for pre-order in October 2009 with final delivery scheduled for February 2010.

First due out in 2008 as Quicken Financial Life for Mac, the software release schedule has gradually slipped. Intuit spent the time working with beta testers and when they found areas that needed improvement rather than release the Mac product they continued to refine it.

Feedback from Mac customers led us to rethink our approach to developing Quicken for Mac. We went back to the drawing board and are making changes to everything from what the program does to how it looks. We spent extra time building a reconcile mode for the new register, a robust Windows-to-Mac transfer function for new Mac users (and existing customers running Quicken on a Windows virtual machine), and redesigned the experience to make it look and feel like a native Mac application should.

We understand our loyal Mac customers are disappointed that the product won’t be in stores until after the first of the year. For that, we apologize. We think taking our time to get it right will be well worth it and will make Mac customers even more excited when they use the new Quicken for Mac early next year.

Intuit

QuickBooks Pro 2009 – $59.99 Today (June 1, 2009) Only

June 1, 2009 by Wayne Schulz

Today only (June 1, 2009) grab a copy of QuickBooks Pro (full version) for only $59.99 at Staples.com. This is an online deal only and is not available in store (though you may order online and have it shipped to your store). Staples offers free local shipping.

The pricing is about half of the QuickBooks normal street price which seems to fluctuate between $119 and $130.

If you’re using an older version of QuickBooks this represents an excellent opportunity to come current. Remember that Intuit periodically requires anyone using Payroll to be on their latest supported version and has recently stopped supporting QuickBooks 2006 which means that anyone using that version who wants to continue using payroll MUST upgrade. This deal is the lowest price that I’ve seen.

Staples via ERP Users

Sleeter Group QuickBooks Conference November 9-12 Registration Open

May 28, 2009 by Wayne Schulz

If QuickBooks Consulting is your forte – then be sure you register for the Sleeter Group’s annual conference (November 9-12, 2009 in Florida) which has just started early registration.

I attended the conference last year and found it to be extremely helpful in learning more about a product that we compete often against.

You may ask why we would attend a QuickBooks conference for a product that we don’t represent

The answer is simple. No one product can offer a solution that fits every business. Where our solution isn’t the right fit – we often (and regularly) recommend other possible solutions for our prospective clients to investigate. Having a good solid knowledge of the marketplace is what sets Schulz Consulting (in our humble opinion) apart from competitors who might be focussed on only moving boxes of software.

Three Days of Intense QuickBooks Training and Networking

The Sleeter Conference features multiple tracks of QuickBooks learning sessions which are offered on a variety of topics including report writing, add-ons, upgrades, new features, etc.

Each day begins with a keynote address that sets the stage for the day’s events. Intuit addresses the group and can be expected to give a road map and overall discussion about the newer features coming in any expected upgrades.

What I liked the best about the conference was not the Intuit keynotes but rather the impromptu demonstrations given by the technical support managers from Intuit. These informal demos contained loads of information, were totally live, totally interactive and didn’t contain one boring Powerpoint!

Doug Sleeter and his group also offer a great collection of training materials and users guides that any QuickBooks consultant will find helpful.

Highly recommend.

Links:

Character Limitations for QuickBooks Fields

Our recommendation:

Here is Intuit’s response:

You may ask why we would attend a QuickBooks conference for a product that we don’t represent

Three Days of Intense QuickBooks Training and Networking

QuickBooks Consulting Conference

QuickBooks Training Guides and Manuals

Sleeter Group Web Site

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