Quickbooks is garbage - Reason #15

You have spyware on your 386-33.

The malware is in your brain and you can't get rid of it.

If you have a 5MB file and only one user Cash Basis reports are still slow but maybe not that much slower than Accrual.

If you have a 100MB file on a network with 3 users then you'd see the garbage that is Quickbooks in all its glory.

Until you do, shut up.

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It's just a matter of configuring things correctly - perhaps you should learn a bit about the product and the operating system the server is running. If a 100 MB QuickBooks file is slow to open or generate reports you really need to optimize the file I/O on your server and check your network traffic. In the case of a Windows server, a couple of changes to the registry, a reboot and you can easily cut the time involved in opening the file and generating reports down by 95%. Google IoPageLockLimit and DisablePagingExecutive for more information.

For the record, one of my clients has a 400MB file, QB Enterprise, 10 users in the file constantly, ad hoc and memorized reports being run all the time and they have very quick performance - QB loads the file in less than 20 seconds typically and no one feels the product is slow nor does it ever hang.

Good luck to you.

The malware is in your brain and you can't get rid of it.

If you have a 5MB file and only one user Cash Basis reports are still slow but maybe not that much slower than Accrual.

If you have a 100MB file on a network with 3 users then you'd see the garbage that is Quickbooks in all its glory.

Until you do, shut up.

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I've got a 260Mb file, five users, and mine runs quick-like-a-bunny.

But of course I'm not running it on a 386-33.

There's no Windows server. Quickbooks is not sold for server environments anyway. It's a simple Windows XP peer to peer network with a separate network storage and the data file I'm working with today is 140MB.

If you know of any tweaks to speed up file access I'd appreciate the information. However, calculations for cash basis reports are inherently slow in Quickbooks due to the horrid software design of its database. The difference in calculating accrual and cash basis reports has been a staple of Quickbooks since version 2.

If they only enter transactions then fine. If they do reporting I'd love to see concrete evidence of that. But Enterprise is different because as I've mentioned before, Enterprise converted a 180MB Quickbooks 2004 file down to 85MB. That means they finally got rid of some crap bloat in the program that makes Quickbooks run like molasses with all that waste in code and in a mess of a database that it's using.

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Quick doing what? Do you do P/L reports by Customer:Job in both accrual and cash basis? If your business is Customer:Job oriented, like Construction, then you'd know what I'm talking about.

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Hey, I know what you're talking about. You've made it crystal clear.

I'm just suggesting you're probably the only one on the planet with the symptoms you describe. That observation indicates something unusual about your shop. It could be you have junk computers, the computers you do have are infested with malware or mis-configured by the twelve-year-old you hired to configure the system, incompetence, malice, drunkeness, or even insanity.

I don't know for sure what's wrong (other than your attitude), but the problem does not lie with QB.

I can tell you what is wrong. He bought cheap network cable. He bought cheap RJ-45 connectors to stick on the end of the cables. He has some 10 base T gear and didn't put it off on its own switch so the rest of the net can run at 100 base T speed. His net is thrownig so many collisions that the throughput is down to 25% of normal. And all his employees are busy running live music and video on their desktops eating up all the rest of the bandwidth.

Of course if he knew what the hell he was doing he would be running QB in the recomended client/server configuration rather than the klunky peer to peer configuration.

That's certainly a possibility I hadn't thought of - it's never been experienced here, probably because we did things right in the first place. Heck, he could be playing the whole shebang on a 4MHz wireless network! Still, the original poster is operating out of the ultimate ignorance mode of "What else could it be?"

Now had he said: "I've scanned my P4-2.6 GHz machines for malware, defragged all the drives, done throughput tests on all my networked machines, yak-yak-yak, we perhaps could sympathize.

How do you know how many transactions a Job has? What report does this?

- ____ _ | __\_\_o____/_|

The job that I dit this timing test on was so small that I did a P/L report on Accrual basis and double clicked (zoomed-in) on the total expenses amount. The resulting report shows all expenses in detail. I then exported this to Excel and sorted by transaction type to get all transactions together.

It would be great if Quickbooks would count how many transactions of any particular type are assigned to a job but this is rocket science for them. They can't even sort a list yet.

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From the QB 2005 product blurb on the QB site:

"Multi-user mode is optimized for Windows 2000 Server or Windows Server 2003 client-server networks, and Windows 98 (SE)/2000/XP peer-to-peer networks."

You are an idiot.

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If I've run Quickbooks since version 2.0 you could safely assume that I know how to tell if a system is infected with anything and whether or not network bandwidth is being sucked up in other tasks.

Even if my setup is not at optimum level, a very reasonable situation given the small business market Quickbooks is aimed for which more often than not does not have a network specialist available, a huge improvement would be to cut out all the crappy bloat in the data file and scale it down to a reasonable level.

If an 180MB data file becomes 80MB for Enterprise it would be a trivial issue for Intuit to clean up the horrid data structure of Quickbooks and do something similar with the Premier, the Pro and the Basic versions. *THEN* we can talk about optimizing a network setup.

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I've been drinking beer for over 40 years and I still can't tell when I'm drunk.

You'd think God would have taken that into account so we could pull our own teeth instead of having to visit a dentist.

So you're going to do nothing on your end until Intuit optimizes their code? Okay by me.

Well, it is indeed possible we're all idiots except you. But at least our QuickBooks installations run well.

Proud mother watching snipped-for-privacy@invalid.com in the junior high marching band: "Look! Everybody's out of step but Johnny!"

Think about it for a second: if peer to peer networks were well suited to running network applications there would be no market for server operating systems. Just because something CAN be done doesn't make it the proper way to do it. And if hundreds of thousands of QuickBooks seats are running fine and yours isn't, who's the idiot? And if you've been running a product since version 2.0 and you hate it so much, yet you keep running it - who's the idiot?

You were amusing for a while but now, honestly, you're just pathetic.

From the QB 2005 product blurb on the QB site:

"Multi-user mode is optimized for Windows 2000 Server or Windows Server 2003 client-server networks, and Windows 98 (SE)/2000/XP peer-to-peer networks."

You are an idiot.

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I'll ignore the rest of your crap because they're stupid comments.

Who the h*ll started a conversation about the merits of servers compared to PtP setups? I don't take the QB blurb as gospel to expect that QB *should* run as good as it would on an optimized server.

So let's suppose I'm an average idiot user and I don't know how to set up my network or I don't want to spend thousands of dollars to get a server and pay the salary for someone to manage it. Why the f*ck does Quickbooks take 9 times longer to do a Cash Basis report compared to an Accrual Basis one? Is that a function of my server? It isn't. It's the result of the garbage that is Quickbooks.

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What's there to do?

Spend several thousands of dollars for a 2003 server setup in addition to hiring someone that can manage it? I can see this for Timberline's programs or Master Builder (barf!) but Quickbooks with 3 users?

A basic Windows Task Manager check for Network Utilitization shows a

65-70% between any of the 3 systems and the box that has the data file when moving or copying large files. It's not the best but let's say that's the max I can get. When QB is calculating a report the net. ut. drops to 8-10% at the most. Is that a network setup problem? I don't think so.

I'm not complaining about an application like Access or FileMaker (for example) and bitch about why they haven't squeezed the last drop of performance by writing everything in Assembly code. Quickbooks is a mess.

After all this time they're on the market they should have been improving their program. Instead they dump tons of bloat on it with every new version. We now heard that the 2006 version will be "vastly" improved. Vastly improved crap that recalculates a report if you change the header.

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Well here we are both in agreement. QB is not optimized to run on a server so there really should not be much of a difference if it is simply running on a workstation. Naturally that workstation should only be used as a server and no one should be running applications while others are accessing QB.