Cleaning up data

If your company file has grown too large, you can reduce its size by having QuickBooks clean up the transactions for a period of time that you designate.  You might also choose to clean up your company file yearly, especially if your company file is quite large.  Cleaning up large files can sometimes improve the performance of QuickBooks.

When you clean up data, you specify an ending date for the period of time you want to clean up.   To give unpaid bills and uncleared transactions some time to complete, it is best to choose an end date that is a month or more in the past.

Transactions dated after  your selected ending date are not affected.  For example, if your ending date is 12/31/02, all transactions dated 1/1/03 and later remain intact in your company file.

When you clean up your company file, QuickBooks deletes only closed transactions.   Open transactions are retained.

The Clean Up Company Data wizard lets you choose to clean up transactions as of a specific ending date or you can remove all transactions.  You can further refine the process by selecting additional criteria for removing transactions.

Examples of deleted transactions:

• If an invoice has been paid in full, QuickBooks deletes the details and includes the amount in a summary transaction showing income accounts.  Neither the customer name nor the items sold is retained.  However, if an invoice is unprinted, unpaid, partially paid, or marked as pending, QuickBooks leaves the invoice in your file so you can apply payments to the invoice.
• If you have paid a bill for a reimbursable expense, QuickBooks deletes the bill regardless of whether you have invoiced the customer for the expense.
• If you have QuickBooks Pro or Premier, cleaning up deletes only those estimates that are dated on or before the ending date and that have a job status of Closed.  If an estimate has any other job status (Pending, Awarded, In Progress, Not Awarded, or None), QuickBooks retains the estimate regardless of its date.

Retained transactions

The following table gives examples of the situations that cause QuickBooks to retain transactions dated on or before your specified ending date.  When you follow the steps in the Clean Up Company Data wizard, you'll have an opportunity to remove old transactions and unused items to further reduce the size of your data file.  However, QuickBooks always retains transactions that meet the following criteria:

• The transaction is linked to another transaction that has an open balance.   For example, an undeposited customer payment that you applied to an invoice.  Even though the invoice is paid, QuickBooks retains the invoice because it has a link to an open transaction (the undeposited payment).
  
  
• The transaction is linked to a transaction in the current year.

Summary transactions

The summary transactions that QuickBooks creates appear in the registers of your balance sheet accounts (Bank, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, and so on).   Each balance sheet account has one GENJRNL summary transaction for each month in which QuickBooks deleted transactions.   The transaction amount is the total of the transactions that QuickBooks deleted for the month.

For a given month, the register may also show other transactions that QuickBooks did not delete.   These are transactions that could be affected by transactions you have yet to enter.

When you open a register, you can spot the summary transactions by looking for GENJRNL in the Type field.  To view a breakdown of amounts by account, select a GENJRNL transaction and click edit.  The General Journal Entry window shows the breakdown of amounts by account for ALL summarized transactions for this month.

Note:   You can't edit a GENJRNL summary transaction.

This Decision Tool focuses on Periodic Tasks.