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What If
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Intuit - QuickBooks
Save a Portable Company File
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Intuit - QuickBooks
Successful Portable Company File process
A reader has asked us what the best way is to send a copy of their QuickBooks data via email. QuickBooks offers a variety of ways to send or save copies of your data including a Backup Copy, an Accountant’s Copy, or a Portable Company file. The Portable Company file is a special, highly compressed, version of your data that is perfect for emailing in most cases. In many cases the compression ratio maybe 20 to 1 or higher. The result is a much smaller file containing all of your data that can be sent via Email without difficulty.
To create a Portable Company file:
- From the File menu, choose Save Copy or Backup.
- Select the option to Create Portable Company file, as shown in Figure 2.
- Follow the on-screen instructions to Browse to a location to save the file. I recommend that you save this file to your ‘desktop’, this makes it easier to find when you need to attach it to your out-going email.
- By default, QuickBooks will name your file the same name as your Company file but will add (Portable) to the name and also change the file type to a .QBM file. (.QBM is the file extension for the Portable File format).
- Click Save.
- QuickBooks will display several messages as it goes about creating the company file. Upon completion QuickBooks displays the message shown in Figure 3.
- You can now open your Email program, compose your outgoing message, and attach the QuickBooks Portable Company (.QBM) file to your email. In most cases a Portable Company file is small enough that it can be transmitted attached to an email without any problem.
As a side note, creating a Portable Company file and then restoring that file is an effective way to reduce database fragments. This process re-indexes the database as a whole, and in some cases may serve as a method to repair some (but certain not all) file corruption. But those procedures are a ‘what if’ for another day.