• Slow Performance
• Missing Payroll Data
• Unsupported Version
• Sample Applications

OfficeQ is designed to be a trouble free as possible, but occasionally issues arise. These are topics that we often receive questions about.

Slow Performance

With larger files, OfficeQ can take a long time to extract data. Despite using the best algorithms known, the process of extracting the data from QuickBooks files is slow. It often requires hundreds of queries against QuickBooks's internal database to extract all the data - and over 90% of the time involved is spent internally in QuickBooks. Unfortunately, this is a fact of life for any product extracting data from QuickBooks and every solution available has the same performance issues.

This is compounded somewhat by the fact that the QuickBooks file cannot be changed while the extraction is taking place. It helps if you understand this ahead of time and plan the process accordingly. With larger files, we recommend starting the process at the end of the work day and letting it run into the night hours. This can be done manually - or using an automated process that starts at a particular time.

If you do not need all the data, there are options available to speed up the process. These mainly control the amount of detail extracted for transactions.

Missing Payroll Data (Accounts Out of Balance)

Extracting payroll data is more difficult than other data.  There are four transaction types that make up the payroll data: LiaAdjst, Paycheck, LiabPymt, and YtdAdjst. (transaction types are listed here).

If these transaction types are not being extracted, it is likely for one of the following reasons:

• The payroll subscription service has expired.  If the payroll subscription has expired, you will need to decide if the data is important enough to pay the annual payroll subscription fee to Intuit so you can get the data out. There is absolutely no way to get this data out, using OfficeQ (or any other QuickBooks extraction product) without a valid, current payroll subscription.
• The QuickBooks data file has been transferred from the computer that was used to generate the payroll transactions to a different computer that is being used to extract the data.  The data needs to be extracted from using the same computer and payroll subscription service that generated the transactions.
• The authorization form was not filled out correctly. If the authorization form was filled out incorrectly, the authorization record in the file will need to be deleted and recreated. See authorization form for how to do this.

If this data is missing, there will typically be a dozen or so accounts that are out of balance. These will include whatever bank account payroll checks are issued from - as well as various payroll liability and expense accounts.

Unsupported Version or Operating System

Although this is rare - occasionally we see a combination of Windows operating system and QuickBooks version that works when used interactively - but does not work when using automated processes.

Typically this occurs when the version of QuickBooks being used was released by Intuit before the operating system being used was released by Microsoft.

It has occurred recently with both the release of Windows Vista and Windows 7. In both cases, only releases of QuickBooks that were released after that operating system was released will work properly. For example, Microsoft Windows Vista only supports QuibkBooks 2007 (release5) and later and Microsoft Windows 7 only supports QuickBooks 2010 and newer.

If this is a possible problem, check Intuit's web site and our QuickBooks Versions and Operating System notes.

Sample Applications (Can't Find Needed Files)

The sample applications supplied with OfficeQ rely on a couple of entries in the registry to find other needed files. For example, there is a file (called qsql_queryc.mdb) that contains all the queries used by both the Excel or Access sample applications.

If files are moved after the initial installation, the registry entries will no longer correlate with the files' locations. You will need to manually change the registry to reflect the change.