QuickBooks Payroll Bulletin | December 2007

Cleaning Up and Archiving Your Data

If you have been using your QuickBooks Company file for more than two years, you probably have historical details you rarely need to access. After two years, you should have created needed reports, including your payroll reports, as well as filed tax forms and tax returns.

When you no longer use these details on a regular basis, using the Clean Up Company utility in QuickBooks is an effective way to reduce the size of your data file and boost QuickBooks performance. When you clean up your data file, QuickBooks deletes transactions that you no longer need, replacing them with new general journal transactions that summarize, by month, the deleted transactions. You can also choose to have QuickBooks clean up data by removing list items that you no longer need.

Cleaning up data has a significant effect on your company file. Before you proceed, read all the instructions available in QuickBooks Help under the topic "How QuickBooks Cleans Up Data."

Cleaning Up Payroll

As a subscriber of Intuit Payroll Services, you can clean up data only for the previous calendar year and earlier. For example, to condense data from the previous year, choose December 31 of the previous year. You cannot clean up data in the current year, and QuickBooks does not remove any payroll transactions dated in the current calendar year.

If you use Assisted Payroll, you must also start payroll for the current year before cleaning up data from previous years. To start payroll for the current year, write at least one paycheck and send payroll data to the service during the current year.

To clean up your QuickBooks Company file (QuickBooks 2008, 2007, 2006):

  1. In QuickBooks, go to the File menu and select Utilities.
  2. Select Clean Up Company Data.

Note: The Clean Up Company utility in earlier versions of QuickBooks (2005) was called Archive and Condense.

If you use QuickBooks 2005, follow these instructions to Archive and Condense your data:

  1. From the File menu, choose Archive & Condense Data.
  2. Choose a condense option. You can choose to remove all transactions as of a specific date or you can remove all transactions.
  3. Continue through the wizard screens, choosing items to be removed. Removing unused items can greatly reduce the size of a data file and may improve performance.
  4. Click Begin Condense when you are sure you want to proceed. QuickBooks displays a message stating that it will make a backup file before it condenses the transactions. The backup file ensures that you will still have a record of the details of any transactions that QuickBooks deletes from your company file.
    If you are backing up to a 3.5-inch disk, be sure that you have a blank, formatted disk in drive A or drive B and that you've selected that drive. You can change the name and location of the backup file (QuickBooks suggests the name of your company file with a .qbb extension).
  5. Click OK to dismiss the message and open the Back Up Company File window.
  6. Click Create Back Up and then condense your file.

QuickBooks then makes a backup and an archive copy of your company file. The backup file is the compressed version of the company data file, and the archive file is the copy of the file before you condensed. If you need to restore your company file for any reason, you will use the backup version of the file to do so.

Archive Copy

The Clean Up Company Data wizard creates an archive copy of your company file before any transactions are removed. The archive file name will contain the date you run the cleanup process, your company name, and the label "Archive Copy."

The archive copy is read-only; you cannot use it for data entry. However, you can use the archive copy to run reports for those periods in which transactions have already been condensed. Do not depend on the archive copy to restore a data file, in case you have a problem with your system. You should always restore from the backup copy of your data, not the archive copy.

How QuickBooks Uses the Archive Copy

If QuickBooks encounters an error while cleaning up the company file, it will automatically restore your data file from the archive. In such situations, no archive copy is retained.

If the cleanup process completes successfully, the archive copy and the cleaned up company file co-exist on your disk. If you want to keep a separate archive in another location, you must back up the archive file in a separate backup process.

As with any two different company files, only one can be open at any time on a single machine. You cannot open both the archive and the cleaned up copy of your company file.

QuickBooks Payroll Bulletin
Editor: Lise Quintana
Publisher: Intuit
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