Crazy question on QB Pro

[BuffaloChips]

The family restaurant was using someone for bookkeeping that apparently used the enterprise edition of QB. We have had to scale back and need to do the bookkeeping ourselves. We have a copy of QB Pro 2010 and want to see if we can get this to work. When trying to restore the back up copy that the bookkeeper provided, it says that you can't restore a back up from an enterprise edition to a non-enterprise edition. What can we do to fix this issue? We need all the information in the back up and I don't want to manually do all of that. Those in charge around here like to do reports over various periods to try and figure the trends, etc. I need this back up to work. Any ideas?

[Joe Williams]

Contact Shannon, I think that he can 'convert' the Enterprise file to Pro/Premier, for a charge.

[BuffaloChips]

Oh yeah, I thing the "powers-that-be" in the co. will love the idea of paying out monies they say aren't available for something like that. I caught enough grief just getting this copy of QB. Not to mention the fact that would be giving someone else access to the co. financial info. Thanks for the thought though. I really do appreciate it. Would be nice if there was a way I could do it myself.

[jonabyte]

Then you would need to start a new set of books in the version of qb you are using. You can import certain areas of the old one, but I am not that familiar with the enterprise version.

[lisa_mn]

You can do it yourself with the data transfer utility available at www.q2q.us, but even that will cost $149 and a fair amount of time.

[Shannon Tucker]

The economics of a $275 edition conversion work out pretty well, I think, considering how many hours of somebody's time you'd have to pay to recreate the company.

[BuffaloChips]

This is exactly what I feel is ridiculous. Just because someone started doing the bookwork for us with a very expensive edition, I now have to either rebuild from scratch, start new books and screw what they like to see from month to month or purchase said EXPENSIVE software package. Just a nonsensical way to force the purchase of the same edition to continue with your record keeping. I find that reprehensible as I do the thought of spending $149 on a program that just may do the trick. The thing is that the company is not in a position to do those things. Operating funds are at a minimum and NOT available for such things.

It is a sad thing that software companies do such things. If there were worthwhile alternatives, I would certainly leave Intuit in the past.

[lisa_mn]

You can't blame Intuit because someone bought the wrong package. They should have started out with Pro or Premier. Enterprise is a different beast and there's no reason to expect it to have downward compatibility.

[BuffaloChips]

I CAN blame Intuit for making this ridiculous. We were paying someone who COULD AFFORD that edition. You can't expect that a "Mom & Pop" organization to be able to afford much when on the brink of losing their shirts! There is no reason for storage/back-ups of the financial info to only work on ONE specific edition of the software. Windblows OS'es ALL store information the same way and are able to go from one edition to another. As well as backward to earlier iterations. The only issue that can possibly cause issues is NTFS and that isn't such a big deal these days.

[Shannon Tucker]

It's not about compatibility with operating systems or hard drive formats. It's about the design of the databases. The Enterprise database has extra capacities designed in that makes it different from Pro or Premier editions. They are not interchangeable.

I'm sorry that your business is struggling; lots of people in this boat these days. I talk to people all the time who don't have budget for unanticipated software problems. It affects us too.

One other thing...we are not Intuit. My company specializes in accounting database work, so we offer the edition conversion as an independent service. fyi.

[BuffaloChips]

Excuses, excuses. I haven't seen anything different about any of these variations that makes that kind of difference. Especially as far as what is needed to save the basic company information. But, what ever. I have had enough of this silly debate. If there is no way short of paying exorbitant amounts of money for a program, that I can neither use nor afford or someone to convert it for me: this is a useless endeavor.

[PennyLane]

This is not an Intuit issue, it's a bookkeeper issue, they never should have set up a client in Enterprise that did not own the software. I have Enterprise but I only use it for my Enterprise clients. I would NEVER put one of my clients on Enterprise unless they owned the software. The beauty of QuickBooks is that it's universal and inexpensive, thereby giving the business owner choices. I can't understand why a bookkeeper would do this aside from trying to proprietize the client or perhaps they just didn't think about it.