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Knowledgebase

April 2008's Trick of the Trade

Question

Every day, members of The Sleeter Group Consultants Network tackle the day-to-day problems of their clients in the real world. The following is an example problem and solution that surfaced this month on our Sleeter Group Consultants Network E-Mail Group.

Question: I have a client who is on an old version of QB Enterprise V.5. The company is now smaller and only needs two users. Has anyone used any good tools to move the data down to Premier?

Answer

Stuart McClain, MBA, CPA, CITP: I used Karl Irwin's tool to move from Enterprise to Premier with another client. First, you upgrade to current year's version of Enterprise (Accountant edition) and then upgrade that file. I did this for a client that went from 10 users on Enterprise to three users on Pro.

Jeanne Miller Tarazevits, CPA, CITP: Karl Irwin has a tool that will do this.

Mario Nowogrodzki, CPA.CITP: Yes, Karl Irvin's DTU (Data Transfer Utility) will do this.

Bonnie Nagayama, CPA: We have done several of these projects and it can be time consuming since it is the same process as transferring transactions from one QuickBooks file to another. There are several tools available: I typically use the tools available from Karl Irvin at q2q.us since that will preserve the links between transactions. Although, based on the needs, other tools may be useful as well. As with everything, it depends on the situation. The q2q.us tools will require the two files be within 2 versions of each other (for example QBES 8 or 7 will work with QB 2007 or 2008) so you may need to upgrade QBES first since you cannot go QBES 5 to QB 2008 with Karl Irvin's tools. Keep in mind also that it is not just a "click a button and go" process. It is a full file conversion so there are limitations, especially if the previous file had payroll, Purchase Orders, Sales Orders, etc. Hope that helps get you started.

Final Response: Thank you to everyone for responding, and especially Bonnie for your lengthy and detailed response. I think I will have to help the client evaluate the value of the data they are hoping to retain, versus just having an old version of QuickBooks to refer to.

Editor's note: Karl Irwin's Data Transfer Utility is avialable at q2q.us. Bonnie Nagayama will be giving three webinars on File Conversion during our Spring Webinar Series. Mario Nowogrodzki will be offering two webinars on networking. For a complete schedule, see www.sleeter.com/webinars.