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As we've been discussing, Condensing or Cleaning Up your company files will enhance the performance of QuickBooks because the amount of detail in the file is reduced. Remember that in Condensing, we will be deleting cleared, completed and reconciled transactions. The advantages are that we will end up with a smaller file that will increase our productivity. It'll take much less time to run our reports. The downside is that the Clean Up is very important. We talked earlier in terms of making sure that our Sales Orders, our Purchase Orders and our Open Invoices are all cleared out. One of the difficulties, though, is that when we Condense our data, we will not see all this detail in the background. When we go to many of our reports, such as an Audit Trail, you will find that all of the transactions built within this report will be cleared out. This means that if you're troubleshooting different components, you won't be able to get to the individual transactions. Instead all the data for this particular time period will be pooled together in full. Another difficulty that we will have is that we will find open invoices with partial payments will sit out there. Let's take, for instance, an invoice that has a few cents involved. I have an invoice for five dollars and 95 cents, another for 16 dollars and 69 cents. Very frequently when we're going in to clear up these files, we'll find that the customer has paid us 1,636 dollars. We've decided that we're certainly not going to call our client for the 69 cents. However, unless you clear that 69 cents, that transaction will never go anywhere. It's really important to be very detailed about how you're looking at your information. The downside of Condensing our data goes back to the Home Page. We can have many transactions open that just will not clear. In these cases, when we run the Condensing, we will not have enough saved space to have made a difference. Now, please do keep in mind that when I'm looking at Condensing my data, that we can go to some log files and find out if it's working correctly, I press the Control 1 Key and now I'm going to press the Number 2 Key, Control 2. Here I will find that I can get to my open files. In my open files I will have the QBWIN.log. I'm going to open that file. When we Condense a file, if it kicked into any Invoices, Sales Orders or Purchase Orders that were corrupt, it will tell us. However, if an Invoice is staying open because of an unmatched payment, it's not going to appear. Here's where we'll have to do a fair share of Clean Up work. Now, of course, good procedures. Make sure you look at these Profit and Loss Statements very closely every month. Make sure that you are running your Customers Accounts Receivable Aging. Look at it and make sure that your transactions are all clearing properly. The best method of being able to use the Condense is to look at your books each month. Run your Condense as frequently as necessary, but if you're finding again it's coming too frequently, consider either a new company file or an upgrade.