Cleaning up your QuickBooks
This weekend (14 February 2010) will be the first day of the Chinese New Year (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_New_Year). Before the Chinese New Year, Chinese believe that we should clean up our house, throw away unwanted stuff or rather ‘Rubbish’ and decorated up our house to make it look ‘New’ (this is like throwing away ‘Bad Luck’ from the previous year and get ready to receive ‘Good Luck’ from the coming year.)
Therefore, in QuickBooks, we may take this opportunity to ‘clean up’ our accounts too.
What are those things that usually we will be cleaning up?
After months or years that we have using the company file, sometime there will be duplicated elements. The duplicates elements such as duplicated accounts in the chart of account list, duplicated name in the Customer, Supplier, Employee or Other Name list. Sometime, it may have duplicates in either Item list, Templates or Customer Messages too.
How can you clean up your book?
If the duplicated name was the same (exactly same in spelling) by doing a maintenance to your data file, QuickBooks will prompt you an error message “Duplicate Element found”. You will be able to find out the duplicated name from the log file, you may delete off or merge them together according to your requirement.
However, sometime the duplicate was not in exact spelling such as in the name list, one may spell as ABC Engineering Pte Ltd and the other may spell as ABC Engrg Pte Ltd. In the Chart of Account list, one account may spell as ‘Stationery and Office Supplier’ and the other may spell as ‘Stationery and Printing’. These two names may be use in a same nature but due to created in different time or different person, spelling error may occur.
In such cases, you may have to manually scroll through your name list and find out any duplicates in your list. You may require spending some time in it; but it is worthwhile to spend the time. Since it is a new year, take this opportunity to clean up your QuickBooks company file.
I would like to wish all had a happy and prosperous new year.
Gong Xi Fa Cai