Data Problems We’ve Seen in QuickBooks 2016*
In the last few weeks, we’ve seen a number of data stability issues in QuickBooks 2016 that have surprised us a bit. I don’t know if these issues are happening because of a particular QuickBooks update release, or a Windows update, or something else.
Most version 2016 users haven’t had any problems, but from our vantage point in hearing from users who DO have data problems, there has been a definite uptick in database problems specific to version 2016 in the last few weeks.
- Problems upgrading older versions. In the last few weeks, I have spoken with a number of people whose data has failed the upgrade from an earlier version to version 2016. I started getting more-than-usual calls about this when the 2013 version was sunset last month. That’s when many 2013 users were making the jump from version 2013 to version 2016. There are always some people that have trouble upgrading from an older version to the latest version. But there seems to have been more than usual problems with that lately. And the upgrade process itself seemed to trigger the problem; the users I’ve talked to were not having data problems in the older version. With most of the users I have spoken with in this situation, they are having to revert to their pre-upgraded backup (made in the old version) and re-key from there. That’s a bummer if you upgraded your file a month or two ago. In one case I’ve seen, a user had to remain in their 2015 version for now — the data is simply not upgradeable to version 2016 and they have to stick with version 2015.
- Broken transaction links. We’ve seen an unusual number of these in version 2016 data recently. Payments get disconnected from bills, and the bills are reopened, as one example. The only solution is to restore the last good backup (made before the problem occurred) and rekey to get caught up, or to manually delete and reenter the affected transactions. Sometimes this is happening to people when they upgrade, and sometimes it is happening to people who have been using QuickBooks 2016 for a while (without problems).
- Damaged lists. In some cases, jobs get spontaneously reassigned to different customers, transactions get reassigned to different customers or vendors, customer data gets out of sync on the customer center screen. Only solution: Restore last good backup.
- Account balances corrupted. Again, this seems to happen during the upgrade, and the only recourse as per this writing is to restore the last good backup that was made before the upgrade.
Shannon Tucker
- TLG file corrupted. A TLG file is an auxiliary data file that QuickBooks maintains alongside your working QBW file. We can often take a current TLG, apply it to an older backup, and bring the backup up to current condition. With the data problems listed above, in version 2016 data, we can’t do that. The corruption affects the TLG file too and makes it unusable for our data repair efforts.
About this Article
This article was originally published in the QuickbooksUsers.com Blog by Shannon Tucker on June 28, 2016. The article has been reprinted here with the specific permission of Shannon Tucker and QuickbooksUsers.com.
About the Author
Shannon Tucker is co-founder and president of AccountingUsers, Inc., an accounting software support company specializing in solving database problems for QuickBooks, Sage50/Peachtree and BPI accounting software. Shannon was educated at the University of Texas at Austin – Red McCombs School of Business. AccountingUsers Inc. also owns and operates QuickbooksUsers.com, an independent support site for QuickBooks users.