Is QuickBooks for Everyone?

Does your QuickBooks® company file seem to be growing out of control? Depending on the nature of your business and the number of transactions you enter into QuickBooks, your company file might be growing too quickly. If the company file begins to occupy too much of your hard disk space, the performance of the QuickBooks software may be compromised.

There are both technical and practical limitations relating to the use of QuickBooks. Technically speaking, the maximum number of transactions that QuickBooks can actually handle is 2 billion. In reality, this limitation applies more to your computer's hard disk space. Also, each list in QuickBooks has a maximum number of items it can contain, as shown in the following table:

QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions can accommodate unlimited combined lists as well as companies that require software that is scalable. Built on a Sybase 10 SQL database, QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions offers up to six times the number of simultaneous users (over the Pro/Premier versions) and over 110 user permissions, handling greater capacity with speed. QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions also allows the user more flexibility with industry specific tools and customizable fields that track in-depth information.

Although QuickBooks Pro and Premier numbers are large enough to accommodate most businesses, practical limitations usually determine how useful the QuickBooks program will be for a particular business. Does it have the right features that the business requires? For most small businesses, the answer is YES!

However, how quickly a data file grows actually depends on the number of transactions, the amount of information entered per transaction and the number of links per transaction. In most cases, if your company data file grows less than 15 MB annually, the QuickBooks program should be more than accommodating. To approximate whether QuickBooks is suitable for your business, perform the following test:

Step One

Estimate the average number of transactions per month (an invoice, a customer payment and a deposit are considered three separate transactions).

Step Two

Multiply the number of transactions by 2 to determine the monthly growth rate of the data file in kilobytes.

Step Three

Multiply the result by 12 to determine the annual growth rate of the data file in kilobytes.

Step Four

Divide the number of kilobytes by 1000 to determine the number of megabytes.

Note: The 2 KB multiplier does not include list information (which will also grow as new names are added to the file), and is only an approximation that may not be a suitable estimate for all QuickBooks company data files.

To view the current size of your data file, the total number of transactions and other product information, press the CTRL and 1 (on the keyboard, not the number pad) keys simultaneously or hit the F2 button.