Today’s QuickBooks Insight Tip #4: Lying About Your (File) Size
Lying about your file size – the file size information that is shown when you press F2 inside of any QuickBooks file is not always correct. You can confirm by navigating to the .QBW file through a Windows file explorer navigation.
You’re Losing Speed
There was an Electrical Contractor wholesaler who managed stock and one-off purchases for their contractor customers. Their items list was at about 30,000 inventory and non-inventory parts or SKUs. The customer was complaining about speed issues and was sent over to our firm from the Intuit support site.
Their file size when they pressed the F2 key inside of QuickBooks showed about 400MB. Knowing that inventory items hold a lot of data and transactions, that number did not seem correct when the item count in the same F2 screen showed 30,000 items.
When we navigated Windows file explorer to look at their .QBW file it showed a file size of nearly 3Gigs. That amount of data in any database is substantial, so we needed a plan.
Our Solution
Since a lot of the items they ordered were one time purchases and sales, we set up a generic item called “Generic Part” and a custom field where they could fill in the SKU that was needed. Because the custom field held the SKU we could always run a report and total by that SKU. This could be sorted and filtered inside of QuickBooks.
However, since this was a QuickBooks Enterprise customer, we could use QuickBooks Advanced Reporting to create a report that showed any time any SKU was used with the “Generic Part” item more than 5 times over the last 6 months. If the item showed up on our report we would them make the item an inventory part. If not, we would eliminate the need to add thousands of inventory parts and instead rely on the generic SKU.
We ended up setting up a new file and doing a summary conversion for this customer because of other structural changes that we were going to implement to get them through the next 5 years of business before evaluating the need to go to an ERP software and transition out of the QuickBooks space.
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