We have discussed how to back up your company files manually in the previous blog. QuickBooks also has capability to back up your files automatically:
1. Automatic Backup
This type of backup runs automatically after you close your company files a specific number of times. You can set the frequency of automatic backups according to your requirement. If you work on daily basis, it’s wise to back it up daily, too.
To create automatic backup, from Main menu > Create Backup > Local Backup > Only schedule future backups and click Next to open Create backup dialog box:
The Customer and Vendor Profile Lists are those lists dealing with your customer and vendor “profile” to help you categorize more of customer and vendor and produce specific reports by filtering with the profile. For example, one of the Customer and Vendor Profile Lists is Sales Rep List, which can be assigned to any of your sales form to track their income. Let’s assume you have 3 sales representatives named A, B, and C. By assigning a sales representative in every sales form, you can now generate sales report filtered by A, B, and C, to give you total sales of each sales rep.
There are 9 lists available in the Main Menu > Customer and Vendor Profile Lists, each is described below:
1. Sales Rep List
This is used if you need to track your business based on sales representatives, which may be your employee or independent contractor. Each sales representative is assigned initials like example below:
Click Sales Rep drop-down menu > New to add a new sales representative. You can choose names from your Employee, Vendor, or Other Names. Once you set your Sales Rep List and make sure the Rep field is customized to appear in your sales forms, you can then assign a sales rep from a drop down menu within the sales forms.
If you are using QuickBooks 2010 and above, there is another utility function to restore a current backup file to an earlier version. For example, you have your company file in QuickBooks 2013 and have made a backup file. But then you run into problems and you want to restore the 2013 backup file to QuickBooks 2012 and work on it.
You can’t restore the 2013 backup file using regular File > Open or Restore Company > Restore a backup copy function, because of how different versions of QuickBooks use different method of compressing backup files.
You have to do the following instead:
1. In Earlier Version of QuickBooks (QuickBooks 2012 in the above example), go to Main Menu > File > Utilities > Restores Backup for Earlier QuickBooks Version to open its dialog box:
Read more: Restoring a Backup to an Earlier Version of QuickBooks
A Trial Balance report is a report of all general ledger accounts (assets, liabilities, equity, income, and expenses) in a business, listed by account names and values. The purpose of Trial Balance Report is to prove that the total value of all the debit balances equal the total value of all the credit balances. If they don’t balance, the error must be found and then corrected before Balance Sheet and Income Statement (Profit and Loss) can be produced.
Equal values of total debit and credit values, however, does not guarantee that there is no error. For example, if you enter $1,000,- instead of $10,000,- to record a new bank loan, your debit and credit totals would still be the same albeit reduced by $9,000,-.
A Trial Balance report is also one of the requirements from your accountant for your year-end financials seen in Year-end Accounting Quick Checklist.
To produce your Trial Balance report, go to Main Menu > Reports > Accountant & Taxes > Trial Balance:
In the previous blog, we have discussed how to back up your company file which converts a working file .QBW to a backup file .QBB. Having a backup file is extremely important, sometimes the only way, to retrieve a working file when unexpected happens, such as, damaged file, crashed hard disk, or you made a major mistake that you want to undo by going back to file’s original state.
Here is how to restore your backup file .QBB to working file .QBW:
1. From Main Menu, go to File > Open or Restore Company File to open its dialog box:
