Goodbye to QuickBooks 2006 Support

It’s that time of year – Intuit’s annual “Sunset” of older versions of QuickBooks. If you are using QuickBooks 2006 then you won’t be able to use certain services after May 31^st. I’m won’t editorialize on why this is done or if it is a good practice or not, I’ll just discuss what the impact will be on your business.

What will you lose?

• QuickBooks email services
• Merchant Service
• Online Banking services
• Online Billing services
• Intuit based Bill Pay services
• Credit Card Download services (depending on how you do it)
• QuickBooks Payroll
• Support Plans and Services (some may extend beyond the May 31^st date depending on your contract type and date)
• Employee Organizer services

Your data is still good, you can still use the basic QuickBooks features, you just can’t use any Intuit based services that depend on an Intuit server or on-line feature.

This applies only to the 2006 releases of any QuickBooks product, including Pro, Premier, Enterprise, POS and the Invoice Manager. If you have an older version, you’ve already gone through this, if you have a newer version you aren’t affected (yet).

What can you do? About your only option is to upgrade to the newest version of QuickBooks. You can get Pro and Premier at a discount if you order on line.

There is some good news if you do upgrade:

• All of your QuickBooks data should convert easily (but make backup copies first).
• Any properly written third-party add-on program should continue to work without any changes needed (my CCRSoftware products all do).
• With the 2009 product you can now send your invoices (etc.) via your own Outlook email system, rather than using their email server (I really like this enhancement).
• There are a number of new features that you could find beneficial

There are some issues, though. The primary drawback (at the time this is being written) is that they have rewritten the online banking feature, and quite a few people are not happy with this. If you use online banking to download a significant number of transactions into QuickBooks you might not be happy with the new release. There are workaround, but these usually involve purchasing a third party add-on. You may want to review my article on How to Deal With QuickBooks 2009 Online Banking.

In general, I usually recommend upgrading to a supported version. Be careful if you do upgrade – please consider the following points:

1. Make a backup copy of your company file using your current version of QuickBooks before installing a new version.
2. You may want to consider using the “rebuild” function in the File/Utilities menu, to clean up the database a bit.
3. Print current financial statements.
4. Install the new program in a separate folder than your older copy – so you still have the old copy available along with the new copy.
5. When you open your company file with the new program it will convert it to the 2009 format. You cannot change this back to 2006 (or any version older than 2009), which is why I recommend a backup copy before converting.
6. Use the Automatic Update feature to update to the most current revision – a very important step.
7. Examine the company file with the new version to see that all features are working. You may find that you have to changes some settings relating to emailing of invoices (etc). Also, print another set of financial statements and compare them with the ones you printed before converting.

If you find any problems you still have your older installation, you can restore the backup copy and continue to work with that until you determine what the problems were with conversion.

PLEASE NOTE that I am a very cautious person – most people won’t have problems. But a few do, and you don’t want to be stuck in a corner if you don’t take proper precautions.