Quickbooks Condense for Canadian Files

Canadian versions of Quickbooks do not come with a built-in condense feature unlike the US versions of Quickbooks. This article will detail the options available to Canadian users of Quickbooks to archive, condense, create a period copy, or create a new data file from an existing data file.

What is a Quickbooks Condense?

The Quickbooks Condense removes closed transactions from the data file prior to a cutoff date and replaces it with summarized journal entries. Let say you have a data file with data from 1/1/2000 to date. Assuming you used a condense date of 1/1/2015, the condense will remove all closed transactions prior to 1/1/2015 and replace it with journal entries to keep all the balances in the file correct. The condense can also delete Accounts, Customers, Vendors, and Items in the data file that are not linked to transactionsafter the cutoff date. If you are having performance issues, this is the best way to shrink the data file and speed up performance.

What is a Period Copy?

A Period copy is like a condense except you choose a start and end date of transactions in the data file. This is useful for providing federal agencies a copy of your data file for events such as audits where you don't want to provide any more data than is requested.It can also be used in cases where you need to start a new data file when there are issues with the data file in a certain date range or corruption issues and you want to start with clean data from a known date range.

How to manually condense a Quickbooks Canadian file?

There is no easy way to manually condense a data file. One way to do it would be to run financial reports in the data file and then manually delete all transactions in the data file prior to the cutoff date. You can use a tool to mass delete all transactions prior to the cutoff date. Then add back journal entries based on the financial reports you ran on the cutoff date to enter opening balances in to the data file. If your data file has inventory, you will need to enter opening balances for Inventory as well.

Quickbooks Canada Condense Service

Instead of starting a new data file when your file is too slow or gets too large, you can use a Quickbooks Condense service to condense your data file so it only has a few years of data (ideally only the last 2 fiscal years). This will shrink down the file size and it will dramatically speed up the performance of the data file as the new file would only have a subset of the transactions in the data file. It would be as if you only used the data file for 2 years (if you chose to keep only two years of data in the file). For more information, click the link below:
Quickbooks Super Condense Service