Dropbox and QuickBooks

[forrestcupp]

I learned the hard way that it's not a good idea to store a QuickBooks file on Dropbox to try to share between 2 computers. You don't save your file in QuickBooks; it automatically updates. That can cause some major problems.

I was on one computer and I ran payroll, and sent in an e-payment of federal taxes. Then later, I got on my other computer and opened up QuickBooks. The problem was that it opened the old file before the Dropbox client had a chance to update. Since QuickBooks automatically saves the file whenever anything is done, it saved the old version of the file and gave it a time stamp of after the real latest version of the file. Since it had a later time stamp, Dropbox synchronized that file from before I sent in the tax e-payment, which meant I was going to have to run it again, even though it had already been paid. ](*,)

I ended up working some magic on the first computer and I fixed it. You can bet that the first thing I did was get my QuickBooks file off of Dropbox and only on the local drive.

[Docaltmed]

I learned the hard way that it's not a good idea to store a QuickBooks file on Dropbox to try to share between 2 computers. You don't save your file in QuickBooks; it automatically updates. That can cause some major problems.

I was on one computer and I ran payroll, and sent in an e-payment of federal taxes. Then later, I got on my other computer and opened up QuickBooks. The problem was that it opened the old file before the Dropbox client had a chance to update. Since QuickBooks automatically saves the file whenever anything is done, it saved the old version of the file and gave it a time stamp of after the real latest version of the file. Since it had a later time stamp, Dropbox synchronized that file from before I sent in the tax e-payment, which meant I was going to have to run it again, even though it had already been paid. ](*,)

I ended up working some magic on the first computer and I fixed it. You can bet that the first thing I did was get my QuickBooks file off of Dropbox and only on the local drive.

I hate QuickBooks with the heat of 1,000 suns. We switched over to Gnucash two years ago, and it has done everything I've asked of it, from payroll to inventory to invoices. I am so glad to have left QB behind. QB 2010 was such a bloated piece of computing hackery that it brought my desktop to its knees every time I opened it up.