The holiday season is time to be thankful for the blessings bestowed upon our families, it is a time to remember friends and relatives, and for families it is a time for parents to celebrate their children, and children to celebrate their parents. But sometimes the relationship between parents and children can become ‘corrupted’ by any number of causes; and do you know what? QuickBooks is no different, the relationship between parent and child members of a QuickBooks list can become ‘corrupted’ too.
It was a bitterly cold day with temperatures in the single digits, and wind chills below zero; ice and snow covered the ground, and our Data Detective was nursing a sore finger he had jammed during a swift fall upon the ice while stepping-out to the local pastry shop; we all know how our Detective just can’t resist the pastries. On his way back to his flat, after the fall, the local cobbler stopped our sleuth as he passed by the little shoe repair shop. By now the detective had bandaged his jammed finger with gauze and tape, almost all they way up to his elbow (he tends to overdo things from time to time).
It seems that the Cobbler had experienced a problem with his QuickBooks Chart of Accounts; one time he would search for an account in the stub of a check and the account was in the list, but the next time he couldn’t find the account he was looking for. He would open the COA and sometimes the account was in the list, and sometimes he couldn’t locate it. This was becoming more frequent, but almost always involving the same accounts.
After making a ‘windows copy’ of the Cobbler’s QuickBooks Company (*QBW) file, the Data Detective opens QuickBooks in single-user mode using the Admin password. (This is a little hard to do with his bandaged finger, but somehow he will endure the 'pain'....) The old sleuth then runs the Verify Data utility and when it completes he opens the QBWin.log file and begins to review it for LVL_ERROR messages. The Data Detective quickly identifies the error he is expecting, Error:Verify Account List Item 300: Invalid parent 200, expected 202. Our sleuth knows that this error means that a sub-account in the Chart of Accounts is not indexing properly.
But just because our Detective knows the type and cause of the corruption doesn’t mean he has all the forensic data needed to solve (resolve) the issue at hand, he must first locate the problem child in the Chart of Accounts. In order to do this he must export the COA for analysis within Excel. From the Utilities sub-menu of the File menu our Detective selects the option to Export the COA as an iiF file. Once the file is exported the file is then opened using Microsoft Excel; Excel must descramble the data in the file using tab delimited formatting. With the file open our sleuth begins a review of the REFNUM column to identify the specific Accounts that are associated the invalid account(s). Now our Detective has the information he needs to fix the problem.
Returning to the QuickBooks Chart of Account the Data Detective locates the ‘child’ sub-account he has been sleuthing-out, he then edits the sub-account to temporarily remove the check mark designating the account ‘Is a subaccount of’. The old sleuth knows that he will need to restore this relationship after the repair process is completed, so he proceeds to saving the changes.
At the bottom of the Chart of Accounts the Data Detective first selects the option to ‘Show Inactives’, he then opens the Account menu at the bottom of the Chart of Accounts list. Our sleuth now selects the option to display the list in “Flat View”, and then from the Account menu also selects the option to “Re-sort List”. The Data Detective completely closes the COA and then re-opens it and once again returning to the Account menu “Re-sorts” the list one more time.
The Data Detective now runs the Rebuild Data utility, which begins with a complete back-up of the QuickBooks data, after the Rebuild completes our sleuth knows that sometimes the rebuild utility can complete and still certain errors may exist, so he again reviews the QBWin.log file and this time the LVL_ERROR pertaining to the Verify Account List is gone.
It is now time to restore the ‘parent – child’ relationship and so the Detective reopens the Chart of Accounts, edits the account temporarily changed to restore the account to its ‘sub-account’ status, and then for safety purposes he Re-sorts the COA one more time. Another Verify Data shows that the problem is resolved and so the Data Detective has resolved the Case of the Invalid Parent.
As the old sleuth departs from the Cobbler’s shop into the cold he thinks to himself, “cobbler, cobbler, how good would some hot apple cobbler be on such a cold snowy day”; he quickly reverses direction, passing by the Cobbler’s shop to once again enter the Bakery for a well-deserved dish of cobbler. There is absolutely nothing like filling the tummy with something yummy this holiday time of the year, after all holiday cheer in every way is “Elementary My Dear Watson,” and so to all you parents and children may you have 'good cheer' all the year.