Tax Guru – Ker$tetter Letter

Q:

Subject: Quickbooks Update/Conversion

Kerry:

I just got through reading your information on “Quicken vs. Quickbooks” and it was very helpful. I am a business administrator at a church just south of Nashville and we recently upgraded from Quickbooks 2002 to Quickbooks Pro 2007. We have used Quickbooks for 15 years.

Everything went great except the reports for one of our accounts will not convert over. It tells us that we will have to recreate all of the reports. We have four accounts in Quicken; Budget, Savings, Reserve and a construction pledge account. All of the reports transferred over with no problem except for the budget account. We have spent hours on the phone with Intuit support and they have not really been helpful. About the only thing we can get out of them is that since our reports are set up on a cash basis instead of an accrual basis they will not convert over. This is not really accurate since the other three accounts are all set up on a cash basis and all of the reports converted over just fine. 

The budget account is our largest account and has the most reports that are set up so this will be a major pain to redo all of the reports.

Any thoughts you might have on this? Have you seen this before and if so do you know a solution?

Thanks,

A:

I don’t have any easy solutions for this kind of problem. Having been through very similar situations myself – especially going from Quicken to QB – I do want to share my experiences. 

First, I only work with Cash basis reports and have in fact been quite frustrated with the way in which most Intuit reports start off as Accrual and make us modify them to reflect Cash.

The first time I had the kind of problem you mentioned, I ended up spending hours and hours researching online tech support, user forums and having phone calls with Intuit.  The end result was the same as you had; the reports had to be set up from scratch in the newer program. However, when I did that, it only took about 15 minutes to set up the new report, and it turned out to be much more useful than the original one in the older program.

Needless to say, I was kicking myself for wasting so much time trying to iron out the automatic conversion process when it took so little time to just set up a new report from scratch.  Now, when I encounter similar problems, I just automatically design a new report form scratch to give the same info I want.  These usually only take about five minutes to do.

I’m sure this wasn’t the answer you were hoping for; but if you were to just set up your reports, starting with the pre-configured ones in the new version of QB you are using, you will find that it takes much less time than you thought it would.

Good luck.

Kerry Kerstetter

Follow-Up:

Thanks for your response Kerry…That is what I figured and we will start making the new reports. We, like you, spent way too much time

trying to solve the problem when we could have recreated the reports by now.

 

God bless…