Review: Data Transfer Utility

There are times when you want to move information from one QuickBooks company file to another. You might want to merge records from your salesperson’s laptop to your desktop company file. Perhaps you want to set up a new company with just the open records. QuickBooks doesn’t make this an easy chore. Today I’ll discuss an excellent third-party tool that can help you with this task.

Karl Irvin, a CPA and Certified QuickBooks ProAdvisor in Texas, has a number of very useful utility programs that work with QuickBooks. I’ve used his Data Transfer Utility on a number of occasions to help customers move data from one company file to another, and I’m very impressed with the accuracy and completeness of his programs. Depending on the version of QuickBooks that you are using his program transfers a very wide range of records with a minimum of fuss on your part.

Executive Summary

If you want to transfer information from one QuickBooks company file to another, this is the product for you. It is reasonably priced, it covers a wide range of data (depending on your version of QuickBooks), it performs the transfers accurately and reliably. It provides both a simple way to transfer masses of data as well as the ability to control what is transferred to great detail. I’ve used the product with QuickBooks Premier 2007 and 2008 with great success, and I highly recommend this product.

The downsides are that you have to get a version for your specific version of QuickBooks, it’s fairly technical to run (which is a hard problem to avoid considering what we are doing here), and that it could be a bit more straight-forward to use. I’m a fairly technical person and I could get it to work, if you aren’t very comfortable with computers you might find it a bit confusing at points.

Acquiring the Product

You can download the program from Karl Irvin’s web site and you can pay via PayPal (which also allows you to use a credit card if you don’t want to create a PayPal account).

The biggest problem in working with his product is deciding which version to purchase. His products are very specific to the version of QuickBooks that you are using, as you can see from this table summarized from his how to buy page:

As you can see, his product is specific to the version of QuickBooks that you are using. The price varies with version – the latest copies are $149.00 each (there is a free trial that you can use to see how it works).

In addition, the type of data that can be transferred depends on what version you use. The higher the version, the more information that you can transfer. See his types of data chart for details. I highly recommend that you review this information before purchasing the product. The differences are due primarily to the limitations that Intuit places on third party programs – older versions of QuickBooks are more limited. With the 2007 and 2008 versions of QuickBooks you have a very long list of record types that can be moved.

Installing and Setting Up

I’ll split this into two parts – installing the program on your computer, and getting it to work with QuickBooks.

Installing the program can be fairly simple depending on how your computer is set up. You download a simple installation file and run it on your computer, which doesn’t take long. There are a few things that you have to pay attention to after this:

• If you do not have Microsoft Access installed on your computer you will need to install the Microsoft Access Runtime engine – which you can download from his web page. This should be installed before installing the Data Transfer Utility.
• If you are using Microsoft Vista you must have UAC (User Account Control) enabled. Hopefully you already do, as that is the recommended way to run QuickBooks on Vista.
• Canadian and UK users will need to run a separate utility program (QBXMLRP2Installer.exe) which is available on his web page.

After you have installed all the necessary parts you need to establish a connection with the QuickBooks company files that you want to work with. This is a step that you have to go through for all third party programs that work with QuickBooks – it is a security measure that helps protect your company file from unauthorized access.

Start by running the Data Transfer Utility by double clicking on the desktop icon. In many systems you will see a Windows security warning – the one shown below is what I get on Windows XP:

Just click the open button. You can turn this off if you have Microsoft Access installed but going to the “trust center” in Access and telling the system that this application is trusted (if you need help with this let me know). If you don’t have your own copy of Access then you might not be able to get rid of this message. It’s not a problem, just an annoyance.

This may be a good point to talk about how I work with programs. I’m a fairly typical user in many ways – I don’t read the instructions. I just start using the program and try to figure it out. That means that the program should be easy to use and lead me through the steps I need to take, or things can get frustrating. Karl’s program does reasonably well – I was able to get through it successfully, but there were a few things that weren’t always obvious.

So here we are, at the opening screen. What do we do first? Let’s try the line marked “1. Source Company”. We need to connect to the “Source” company – the company file that has the information we want to extract. I clicked on the add/change button and get the following:

What’s missing from this message is that you need to have QuickBooks running, with your source company file open, while running as the Admin user. If not, you get a warning when you click OK.

If you have QuickBooks running (logged in as Admin – that is very important) and you click OK here, QuickBooks will open the following screen:

It is very important that you click the two options that I’ve highlighted. Click continue and you’ll get a confirmation screen where you will click done, and then the Data Transfer Utility will tell you that the connection has been completed. Close your QuickBooks company file at this time.

Now, step 2. We’ll go through the same process for the destination company. Open that company file as the Admin user, click the add/change button next to step 2, and do the same approval process as above.

Transferring Data

Now that we have the company files set up, we can transfer data. We’ve done steps 1 and 2 so far, so on to step 3? Actually, not really. We need to do step 4 next, to select the types of data to transfer. Click the Change button by step 4 and you get a list of all of the types of data to transfer:

You can select just invoices for example, all lists (item lists, customer lists, etc.), all transactions (invoices, sales orders purchase orders, etc.), or everything. I clicked everything in my example. Then click close form.

Step 5 is important, but I won’t go into details here because what you do depends on what you are trying to accomplish. You can set a date range for the transactions to work with, you can use a wide variety of different selection criteria. In my example I just selected all dates to get everything.

Now, we are ready to transfer. Make sure that you have closed your QuickBooks company file, as the Data Transfer Utility will handle the opening and closing. Click button 6a and the program will open the source company. This may take awhile. You will hear a “thunk” sound when the program is ready (same sound that you get when there is an error message, unfortunately), and the box for step 3 will show the company information. Click button 6b to extract the information. This may take awhile, the processing status button will show the progress. When it is done, you can click button 6c to view a list that shows the results. I’ve zoomed in a bit on the report to show you what it looks like:

The Data Transfer Utility has several options that can be useful. You can use an email transfer to send the export file to another user, or a floppy transfer (does anyone use floppies anymore?) to send the export file to removable media. If you are transferring to another company file on the same computer you just have to go to step 7.

Click button 7a to open the destination file, then step 7b to import the data. When it is done, step 7c will give you a report that shows the results of the transfer.

Conclusion

I’ve used this program in a variety of situations and it has always worked well for me. Being a programmer myself, as well as being a picky person, there are some things that annoyed me, but they were minor. I did run into some error messages in some places – closing a window the wrong way can sometimes generate an error that closes the program down. Some buttons (such as the help buttons) didn’t always seem to work right, although that could be the way my computer is set up. Sometimes it wasn’t obvious what I had to do as far as opening or closing QuickBooks – the program would clearly tell me what I did wrong (usually), but it would be nicer to have it clearly tell me what I needed to do ahead of time.

However, I do know that the processes that this program does are very complicated, due to the way QuickBooks handles data. I’ve not come up with a situation where the data transferred incorrectly – sometimes it would take a few tries to get what I wanted, but that was usually due to my not understanding my data well.

I also am a bit annoyed that I have to purchase a specific version of the Data Transfer Utility for specific versions of QuickBooks (there are discounts for buying multiple versions). It also would be nice if the Install program included the additional items that some users may need to get things running, as optionally installed features, rather than having to go back to the web site to find them. Being a picky person (as I admitted before) I found Karl’s web sites to be a bit difficult to read, as the pages are very dense and full of information. It’s good that all the information is there, but it would be nicer if it was formatted in an easier way. Karl is not a web designer, but then we are not buying web products from him…

In my tests I tried several different things that can be a bit tricky to handle in QuickBooks. For example, I entered data in “custom fields” in several places, such as the item list. Information in these fields are handled in a very odd way by QuickBooks. The Data Transfer Utility handled everything that I asked it to do, even transferring the custom field information.

All in all, if you want to transfer information from one QuickBooks company file to another, this is the product for you. It is reasonably priced, it covers a wide range of data (depending on your version of QuickBooks), it performs the transfers accurately and reliably. It provides both a simple way to transfer masses of data as well as the ability to control what is transferred to great detail. I’ve used the product with QuickBooks Premier 2007 and 2008 with great success, and I highly recommend this product.

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