If you’re hoping to find something through the QuickBooks Help on the limitations of the Accountant’s Copy, I say to you good luck. Sure it will tell you some useful information about what an Accountant’s Copy is, how large it can be, and so on, but it really doesn’t say what you can and can not use it for. There are so many limitations that I wonder why Intuit even bothered with the function in the first place, and I would have to write a short novel to describe them all.
It must have been designed by a Chartered Accountant because they would have only used it to enter in the year end adjusting journal entries to the company file. Even then, if they would have tested it to the max, they would have found out the QuickBooks doesn’t really like importing Control Accounts, like Accounts Receivable and Accounts Payables.
I would suspect that most QB ProAdvisors find out about it’s limitations through trial and error. Some, like my colleague of more than ten years, doesn’t use it anymore because he finds it a waste of time.
Me, I learn by doing and after a couple of times where I had to re-do some work on my own time, which of course was un-billable, I finally got in contact with a Senior QB tech support person who enlightened me on some of those limitations.
First a brief background on what I was trying to accomplish for the client’s. They had both fallen behind in the reconciliation of their bank accounts, like try a couple of years. Not only that, but there were errors in a number of bank transaction entries and the external accountants year end adjusting journal entries had not been posted . Throw in that one of them had used the Online Banking Service to download their banking transactions and in Matching them up, had caused a considereable number of duplications in the paycheques. Forget about making any changes to payroll because you can’t do that with an Accountant’s copy anyways.
After entering in months of transactions and doing the bank rec’s, I then went to import the Accountant’s changes and was faced with so many transactions that would not import, that I ended up converting the Accountant’s copy back to a .QBW company file and redoing all the changes again.
Wasn’t the whole point of this exercise to allow the client to continue working while I put the books in order? Wouldn’t it have been nice for Intuit to have told us what we can and cannot do with the Accountant’s copy? Did they they ever consider that it makes us look like incompetent professionals to our clients, when the Accountant’s changes do not work?
After my most recent problem I decided to contact a Senior tech support person who I had dealt with in the past. Unfortunately she was unavailable so I was passed on to a tech support person named Rob. It was like nirvana to find out that QuickBooks does not like any more than 200 transactions. The second most important bit of information is that it doesn’t want the date from when you take the Accountant’s copy, and the date that you import the changes back into the client’s company file, to be any more than THREE WEEKS.
Now armed with that very important bit of new information I did work and complete three months of bank rec’s on a new clients books with an Accountant’s Copy, and some other minor corrections to the proper Tax Code that was suppose to be used, and guess what? The Accountant’s changes that I had made did import back to the client’s company file – and no errors or problems.
What was the difference you ask? It was less than three weeks between the time that I received the Accountant’s copy and importing the Accountant’s Change File. Is that what was missing which had caused the problems before - that I described above?
Well, you’ll have to check back again to this site to find out because I’m like a dog with a bone, and I will surely give it a try again to see if it truly does work.
Closing Quik Tip: If you need to do some bookkeeping work for your client, and you don’t have faith in the Accountant’s Copy concept, try using the Remote Access that QuickBook ProAdvisor’s have access to. That way you can do the work, end the remote when you’re finished, and the company file stays at the client’s location.
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