QuickBooks 2019 Desktop - Data File Optimization

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This new feature gives you the ability to substantially reduce the size of a QuickBooks Company file without loosing any of your actual transactional data. This new option for condensing your Company file keeps all your transactions but removes the audit trail information to date (from the beginning of the audit trail until the date of the actual condense).

The Audit Trail is one of the major sources contributing to QuickBooks Company File size. In fact, in many files, the Audit Trail may be responsible for 30% or more of the total file size. For many QuickBooks users, condensing the file in this manner is a far better option than attempting to condense the file by removal of transactional or list data that they may need to reference on a regular basis.

Because QuickBooks makes a copy of your original file prior to performing the Audit Trail removal process, you still have a ‘historical file’ available that ties all of the transactional data to the audit history of each transaction. Going forward, your smaller file should give result in improved performance while still allowing you to access your entire transactional history.

By the way, in the example shown here I was using a QuickBooks ‘sample file’ so the date was accelerated to 12-15-2023. I just wanted you to know why the date was so future-forward since this feature does not allow you to actually ‘set the date’ of the audit trail removal, QuickBooks uses your computer's ‘system clock’ (unless otherwise adjusted by the application as in a sample file) to determine the date/time of the removal process.

In addition to the audit trail removal, this process also cleans-up several internal performance logs stored as part of your Company file and then runs 'unload/reload' which (in layman terms) streamlines the database similar to the process found in restoration of a portable company file.

In this example, you can see that this new feature did a great job. It reduced this sample file size by 47% going from 36 MB to 19 MB without disrupting any transaction or list data. 

Based upon my testing with several different Company files ranging from 300 MB to 1.2 GB the file sizes were reduced between 31- and 49-percent. In reviewing the Audit Trails of each file prior to reduction, it appears that files that have a history of a lot of changes to transactions were impacted more significantly by this new process than files with fewer transactional edits.  That makes perfect sense, a file with more entries in the Audit Trail resulting from transactional edits has more removable audit trail data, which represents a larger percentage of file size as a whole. 

I’m personally excited about this new functionality because it allows for significant file size reductions without impacting the transactional history of the file, or without requiring summary transactions to keep balances intact.

Notes & Disclosures:

Graphics or other illustrations used in this article have either been prepared using a pre-release version of QuickBooks 2019 software, or were furnished and/or adapted from Intuit source content. Be aware that certain aspects of features described or illustrated herein may have changed between the pre-release software version we used and the release of QuickBooks 2019 desktop products scheduled for September 4, 2018.

This article is intended to serve as a summary of one specific QuickBooks 2019 product features, it is not an in-depth review nor has it been written to provide instruction in the proper use of the software (or feature).

While the writer or editor may express a personal opinion within this article regarding this feature and/or the software as a whole, such personal opinion does not constitute a formal endorsement by Insightful Accountant or the publisher.