When IBM announced last week a new business solution for the small and medium market, some technology reporters called it an iPod for the business world. IBM calls it the Smart Cube (just one aspect of a larger IBM Smart Business solution) – described by IBM as an appliance that comes prepackaged with  applications needed to run a small or medium business including email, calendaring, security and finances.

In my last blog, I wrote about how to help those who just can’t seem to give up their old QuickBooks files. Some can’t give up their older editions of QuickBooks either which makes it hard for us to serve these clients since we don’t want to support multiple years and editions of QuickBooks on our computer systems. Maintaining older editions on your computer system can take up valuable space which is badly needed and can cause QuickBooks to move slowly. You may choose to uninstall the older versions by going through the control panel.  If an error message appears that you’re missing a component - What do you do?

Some people just can’t part with their high school yearbooks and old love letters, or… their old QuickBooks® files. Have you seen clients with QuickBooks files dating back more than 5 or 10 years? The archive function in QuickBooks can help with this – find it under the File Menu, Utilities, Clean Up Company Data. Running the Clean Up Company Data utility does not officially reduce the size of your file, however, this is what it can do - it will Verify Your Data to make sure there are no errors in the QuickBooks File database and remove old transactions that you don’t need anymore. Make sure you back up your file and verify your data first – before doing anything!