TECHNO TOPIC: QuickBooks List Damage - Templates

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Transaction Template Errors

While a large percentage of QuickBooks users ‘never’ change a template relying on the standard forms just the way they come from Intuit; however, one of the things that many QuickBooks users like about the software is the ability to customize most of the standard template forms.  The extent of customization can range from simply adding a Company logo, to turning on a few extra fields.  But you can get about as detailed in the customizations as you want.

With this flexibility comes the potential of producing data corruption when fields required to be captured and/or presented are missing from customized templates or fields of data overlap other data being capture.  Template errors are a common form of QuickBooks list corruption.  Because the various templates are managed from the ‘template list’ corruption of even a single template is considered list damage as opposed to transactional damage.  The transactional issues are associated with the corrupted template.

This type of error typically involves one of the ‘sales form’ templates (such as sales orders, sales receipts or invoices), since they tend to be the templates which are most commonly customized by users. When customization leads to field and/or data conflicts, you may see an entry reporting a Template Error in the QBWin.log file.  To resolve this type of problem, it is generally not the transaction that needs to be modified as much as it is the template creating the offense.

If you have a transaction identified in the QBWin.log with an error and your review of the individual transaction yields no discernible cause of the error, you may also want to consider the possibility that a template conflict is causing the problem even if a template error is not reported in the QBWin.log file.

Prior to undertaking these steps you should perform a back-up of your QuickBooks Company file.

To identify and correct the Template related errors, follow these steps for any affected template(s):

  1. Select the Lists menu and select Templates.
  2. Click the Include inactive check-box. If Include inactive is not accessible, proceed to the next step.
  3. Click the Templates button,
  4. Select the option to Re-sort the templates list. (See optional Re-sort below***)
  5. Select the first template in the template list, and then click the Open Form button. If the form opens without error, close the template and move to the next template.
  6. Repeat step 5 for each template in the list.
  7. When an error occurs, close the form.
  8. In the Templates window, select the template that generated the error.
  9. Click the Templates button,
  10. Choose Edit Template, and
  11. Click the Additional Customization button in the Basic Customization window.
  12. Click the Default button, to restore the template to the original configuration.
  13. When prompted to continue, click OK. (Note: If had previously customized this template, you will need to customize the template again after completing these steps.)
  14. Click OK to save the changes.

You should now be able to open transactions that used this template without any error.

***Resort option - In many newer versions of QuickBooks you will find the Re-sort option listed under the 'View' Menu (rather than the list's function button). With the template list open, open the 'View' menu from the menu bar, then select the 'Re-sort list' option.