Subtitles of the Movie

In our preceding movie we discussed what to do when we outgrow QuickBooks. Solutions included condensing your data, creating a new file or upgrading. No matter which method that you choose, it's important to prepare your data in advance before proceeding with the solution. When we talk about preparing our data, we're talking in terms of removing obsolete transactions. The key here is to look through your home page and see how everything is intertwined. For example, let's go down to our invoices. You'll notice that our invoices can be affected by our timesheet and our invoices can be affected by entering bills. These are affected by paying the bills and by inventory. When we're ready to clean up our data, the relationship between each of these items becomes crucial. If I have obsolete inventory, for instance, that I want to delete, if there is an open purchase order, I can not. Nor can I delete it if there's an outstanding sales order that affects the purchase order that affects the inventory. The same thing will hold true with my customer file. If a customer has a sales order, an estimate or an invoice outstanding, I can not clear them from the system. That means we need to do a little work in advance to see what's open and what needs to be cleared out. First, there are a number of reports within QuickBooks that will allow you to see what's outstanding. Here we have our Open Purchase Orders, Open Sales Orders and Open Invoices. Each of these can be obtained from the Report Menu by going into the appropriate menu. For instance, under Customers you will notice the Open Invoices. Under Sales, we will have our open Sales by Customer or by Item. I'll also see under Vendors any of my Unpaid Bills. When we open our Purchase Order Screen, you'll notice that every outstanding Purchase Order is listed. Here we like to pay attention to the dates and look at the oldest ones. Should it still be open, this is where the research comes into play. Let's close out of our Report and go back to our Home Page. I'd like to select an actual Purchase Order that I just created previously. Here you'll see that we have rough lumber on hand. We've ordered 35 pieces but we've only received 20. Now, I've just been notified by our vendor that it's obsolete and I will no longer be able to get this product. At this particular point in time, this Purchase Order is open and will remain open. I must manually place a checkmark next to that line item to notate it as Closed. Once it is closed, then I can eliminate the Purchase Order from my system. If it is not closed, it's still an active document. Here's the difficulty. Let's go to List and down to the Item List. I'm going to pretend that I want to delete the rough lumber from our inventory. If I go down to Item, up to Delete Item, you'll notice that it is telling me it can not delete this item. It's currently being used. I can make it inactive so it does not appear on this List, but it's still going to be contained within my QuickBooks file; hence my file gets too large, my reports and transactions slow down. Let's cancel out and close off our Item List. Once I place this checkmark next to it, provided there are no other outstanding documents, I can now clear this inventory from the list. Let's close out of our Purchase Order. I will not accept my changes and let's look at this relationship in other areas. You will notice that the Sales Order is tied to my Estimate. In this particular instance, when I'm in a Sales Order, it's going to affect my Customer and my Inventory. If I have selected a Class, it will also affect the Class. Again, if I'm trying to clear up my Classes, my Inventory or my Customer, I'm not going to be able to do so because this is an active order. I recommend that when you're ready to clean your data that you look at each of these reports. Perhaps simply closing these reports will speed up QuickBooks as it does not have to review those in an open scenario. Take some time, though, to understand the correlation. Our Home Page is a wonderful place to look through the relationships for each of these items. Whenever you're clearing data and you get that Inactive Screen tell you can not delete a component, look through the history of that item. In the case of Inventory, I'm simply tracing back the arrows. This is telling me every item that is included that is affecting the Inventory from being deleted. You will see the same system in our Vendors, our Customers and our Employees. In Employees situations, it will never allow you to delete anyone from the current year. This is to safeguard your reports and taxes at the end of the year.