If you’re a small business using Quickbooks to keep track of your income and expenses you probably share it with your accountant from time to time. If you only need to share the QuickBooks file at the end of the year, when the taxes are due, it’s a fairly simple process. You just create a backup copy of your data file and send it to your accountant for tax processing while you continue to work on the “live” file.
But if you need to share it more often, perhaps with a bookkeeper, you need to be extremely careful that you don’t each make changes to the same data file. If that happens either the changes that you made, or the changes that your bookkeeper made may be lost.
If you may have more than one person, in a different location, working on your Quickbooks file you need to have some sort of file locking process in place so that it’s not possible to have two people updating the file at the same time.
One way of doing this is to just be sure and check with the other person before you make any changes and then be sure to get them the changed file before they make any changes. Setting up a process of checking and double checking will work, but it can be a challenge.
An easier way is to use My Docs Online, with the Desktop Application to access your QuickBooks file. Your file is securely stored at My Docs Online and whenever you or your bookkeeper (or anyone else you designate) opens the file a file lock can be applied that prohibits anyone else from accessing the file while it’s in use.
We’ve got a video that shows how this works here and you can try it out for yourself by signing up for a Free Trial of our Multi-User Enterprise service. Pricing for the service that would secure support two people accessing the file begins at less than $10 per month.