Chapter 1
What do you expect of QuickBooks?
The usual answer is that
you want QuickBooks to do your bookkeeping
correctly. Or perhaps you want it to do
only some of your bookkeeping, such as
invoicing. QuickBooks is designed to do
accounting correctly. Used well, it can
make a very strong contribution to the
success of your business.
How big is a small
business? Many people want to know how
large a business can be handled in QuickBooks
The answer is very fuzzy. In some ways,
it is bigger than what most people would call
a small business. In other ways, it is
limited, even for small businesses.
Very large dollar amounts
can be handled. In a test company file,
I have set up assets and income in hundreds
of millions of dollars. The most
limiting factor, at press time, is that
QuickBooks remains a single-user application,
and there are no effective
work-arounds. A multi-user program is
expected in the summer of 1998.
Lists, such as customer or
vendor names, or items for sale, have limits
ranging from 5,000 to 16,000 entries,
depending on the list. In practice such
large numbers would be difficult. The
number of recorded transactions is a major
factor. Property maintenance companies,
for example, may have hundreds of small
invoices, and quickly build a large
file. Company files up to 30 megabytes
seem to have no problems. One user had
problems that might be size-related, at 50
megabytes, but another handles a 60 megabyte
file with no problems. Should you
outgrow QuickBooks, the result is not usually
a disaster. It just runs slower and
slower.
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