Intuit Accountants News Central
QuickBooks® Accountant Feature of the Month Review: QuickBooks File Manager
New for 2011, QuickBooks® File Manager (QFM) is a stand-alone program that installs automatically when QuickBooks Accountant or QuickBooks Enterprise Accountant is installed. Essentially a program that links to your existing file structure, QFM is designed to make a few things easier for accounting professionals who service numerous QuickBooks files for clients.
Determining what year version, organizing client files, storing passwords and upgrading in batch are the biggest pain points IntuitTM hopes to alleviate through QFM. The program also helps organize client files by using virtually any criteria users need to group them.
Let’s look at each task and how QFM solves these issues:
Determining what year version. I think this is the strongest feature of QFM. Once you add your QB files (it uses your existing file setup and doesn’t move where the files are stored on your computer or network), you have one place you need to go to access every QB file. In one screen you see the data files, regardless of what type. The screen also shows location, last date the file was modified and with what year version the file opens. The only downside I’ve seen to this is that if there is any data corruption, a file will show as “File Type Unknown.” QFM eliminates the need of having to hover over a file to determine whether the version is 2009 or 2011.
Organizing the files by specific criteria. Once the clients/files are added, they can be grouped pretty much any way necessary – by industry, type of client (write up, tax, payroll) and when you typically work on them (monthly, quarterly, annually) – anything really.
As I was playing with the program and learning about it down in Dallas for the 2011 Launch Tour, I thought this was a strong point. Because each member of a firm may have different clients or may do different work in a file, each person would be able to set up the QFM to suit his or her needs. Like I mentioned in the What’s New webinars: everyone’s brain works differently, so the filtering can be customized individually.
While I still see this as one of the program’s greatest features, quite a few attendees in the webinars mentioned that it would be even better if there was a way to set up the grouping in a network environment to create a uniform system and save time. I have to agree; to be able to set up for an entire network OR individually would be a great addition for 2012.
Storing passwords. This is the one feature I suppose I don’t understand 100%. You have a Password Vault, and in it, you store the username and password for specific files. However, you can’t see them once you enter them, even though the Vault itself has a password. For 2011 files, this isn’t an issue. Once you store the username/password in the Vault, you can open the file directly from QFM and it will automatically enter them for you. Super awesome, right?
So, what’s the point of storing them for any older files? Because older versions of QuickBooks were written before QFM, the older versions don’t know how to “talk” to QFM. As a result, it’s useless to store them in the Vault, which means you have to either remember the file names or keep them in another place – hard copy locked up or in an encrypted file. Why not just not mask the usernames and passwords once they’re stored in the Vault, which has its own password? Now that I’m finished teaching the webinars and can start using QFM to manage my own client files, I’ve found that I’m not using the password Vault at all.
Batch upgrade tool. The last feature I want to talk about is the batch upgrade tool. So far, I’ve only used it to upgrade a handful of files from 2008 to 2011 and haven’t run into any problems. During the webinars, I had a few people mention that they had received errors when trying to upgrade large files, but I think the errors were specific to passwords.
Intuit Project Manager Victoria Dolginsky told me there are two workarounds to password errors; one is to remove the admin passwords prior to upgrade, while the other, preferred method is to add the Admin password to the Password Vault and then perform the upgrade. I must say that when I upgraded my six files, it was so much nicer to select them, start the upgrade and come back in the morning to find them completed. Who really wants to sit there spending unbillable time upgrading file after file? Not me!
All in all, now that I’m finally getting a chance to really use QFM rather than just do a quick demo every few weeks, I’m finding that I tend to open QFM before I open up QuickBooks – and I’m enjoying the ease in filtering and organizing files. I use it to open each file, and in the situations I need it, I even use it to initiate Multi-Instance.
My only major requests for 2012 would be to 1) unmask the usernames and passwords in the Vault so I can do away once and for all with having to keep them stored in two places, 2) offer some sort of network setup, and 3) to be given the option whether to install it when installing QuickBooks Accountant.
What do you think of QFM? Provide your comments below so others will learn from all of our experiences.
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