FAQ:Turn Off QuickBooks Reminders

QuickBooks seems to constantly bombard us with advertisements and unwanted “reminders” about services. There are a couple of ways of turning many of these off, as this article describes.

First, turn off your preference for product/service messages. Select File then Preferences and click on the General preference. In the my preferences tab, put a check in the box “Turn off pop-up messages for products and services”. This turns off many of these advertisements (but not all, in some editions). NOTE that you may find that after awhile, these pop-up messages start again and you have to check this box.

A more drastic approach involves some “surgery” on your computer. Exit QuickBooks. Using windows explorer (or click your my computer folder if it is on your desktop), locate the file named general.qmd. The location of this varies with the operating system you are using. Here are some possible locations. Note that the “XXXX” will either be the year of the product (like “2010”) or version if you are using Enterprise (like “10.0”).

• Windows XP – C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Intuit\QuickBooks XXXX\Components\Messages
• Windows Vista and Windows 7- C:\Program Data\Intuit\QuickBooks XXXX\Components\Messages

Once you find this file, rename it from General.qmd to something like GeneralQmd.Old

Note that you may have to do this again if you install an update. Also, this has to be done on each computer that is running QuickBooks, as it is local to this computer.

Update 12/28/2009 – in QuickBooks 2010 you have the ability to close several of the advertising sidebars if  you update to the R4 or later revision. See this article for details.