I get a lot of questions, sometimes a couple a day, from users who have read something I wrote or from others ProAdvisors experiencing performance issues with their https://quickbooks.intuit.com/https://quickbooks.intuit.com/clients.
They tend to be something like, “Murph, my QuickBooks is running so slow. I wait and wait and wait.” Other times, I'm asked, “What can we do to speed up this QuickBooks? Is the file too big or is it corrupted?”
I’m always happy to try to provide some friendly advice when I have enough information. The problem is that I'm rarely provided with the information I need. When you take one of my Super Geek classes or my Desktop Performance session at "Scaling New Heights," we focus on many of these issues.
And yes, that's another plug for attending "Scaling New Heights 2017," which is being held at the beautiful Disney Coronado Springs Resort in Orlando, Fla., June 4-7.
But let me just say that a diagnostician, like Gregory House, MD, of the TV show "House", typically conducts an exam. Dr. House conducts a whole lot of tests to get the answers he needs to answer those critical questions before he renders a diagnosis.
Old Murph can’t diagnose your problems without adequate data. And since I'm not there, I need your eyes, ears and question-asking ability to do my probing.
In simple, I typically need more details than you tend to provide in your emails, even if you tell me, "They just upgraded from QuickBooks 2014," or "They just bought a new server."
There always are some fundamental questions that I need to be answered. Think of these as that medical history you fill out while sitting in doctor's office or the in the emergency room with the triage nurse.
One of my first questions always is, “What QB version, including release, is being used?"
Next: “How many User licenses are there?”
Those questions kind of makeup the basic background of the patient in the same way the emergency room might ask, “Have you been out of the country lately?”
Now, let’s try to identify a little more closely the environment in which this malady is occurring:
- “How many users are typically logged in to a single file?“
- “Typically, how many total users are logged in to all your files?”
- “How many company files are typically in simultaneous use?”
It would be good to have exact numbers, but rarely is that possible, so intelligent guesses will suffice.
Old Murph can’t diagnose your problems without adequate data. And since I'm not there, I need your eyes, ears and question-asking ability to do my probing.
But that still doesn’t get us all the details old Murph needs. One vial of blood just won’t do the trick. The nurse may have to draw three, four, maybe even six vials to get all the specific test results. So, I must know:
- What’s the size of each QBW file?
- What’s the size relationship of each QBW.TLG file to each Company file? (10, 25, 50, 100, 150, 200 percent, etc.)
Many times, these QuickBooks emergencies require an environmental assessment. If a paramedic is at the scene of a car/motorcycle accident, it's fairly obvious which vehicle the guy who got ran over was associated with.
But when it comes to QuickBooks, it may not be so obvious. It may be more of a situation where the ER doctor asks, “What made this penetrating wound? Was it a gunshot, a fireplace poker or a sword?”
You see, that’s important, because bullets are traveling at very high velocities and can do a lot of damage. But they're also extremely hot when then enter the body, which in many cases actually cauterize the internal tissues as it progresses ever deeper.
On the other hand, a sword is relatively slow moving and cuts internally both on the way in, and the way back out.
So, excuse me, but I need to know what might be causing QuickBooks to bog down, so please tell me about your network environment:
- How much RAM is on the server? (If a virtual server is running QB, how much for that virtual?)
- What else is running on the server?
- What size, speed and density is the server’s disk supporting the QuickBooks files?
- Is the server disk running as a RAID or not? If so, which RAID configuration?
- How much RAM is on each workstation?
- What size, speed and density is each workstation’s disk supporting the QuickBooks application?
If your QuickBooks is struggling to breath, or if it's slowly exsanguinating, and you email me for a diagnosis, just remember, "I can’t make a diagnosis without all the information."
To attempt to do otherwise would be like practicing medicine (oops, I mean QuickBooks) without a license.”
Don’t forget, I'll be teaching some great classes to help you with exactly these kinds of problems at Scaling New Heights-2017. In the meantime, look for more pre-conference-related articles in the weeks to come on the six sessions I'll be teaching.