I would like to take a moment to discuss our journey into Condensing our QB File - I hope if you find this it is helpful to you in your journey.
The company I work for has been with QB for 18 years and it wasn't until this year that anyone from QB discussed our file size with us. We were over 2 gigs and we have heard from several different people at QB about how this can be a problem but it might not necessarily be a problem unless we are seeing performance issues. It depends who from QB you end up talking to - but I digress. We backed up our file every time we attempted to condense to ensure that we didn't actually damage our file and we worked on the back-up.
The first two times we attempted to condense we were on the phone with QB and nothing happened and I mean literally nothing happened - well it isn't a guarantee the QB expert told us. It wasn't until we got on the phone with someone else did we discover that you have to fix any errors you have when you verify/back-up in order for the condense to actually do something. That is what we were told. So, we figured out how to correct the two errors that we had from 5+ years ago and got back on the phone with the same person from QB. She helped us change the cache size to unlimited, telling us that then we should be able to condense. Still nothing happened. At this point we were a month plus into attempting to condense. This is after 2+ months of researching options regarding our file size.
While working in QB I noticed a number at the top right hand corner of my QB - I clicked on it and discovered all of these "to do" tasks. Boxes that were checked of things to print or e-mail and a memorized transaction from 2012 that was never discontinued. We went through and unchecked all of the boxes and removed the memorized transaction. We attempted to condense again....and it worked. No one from QB mentioned this to us, it was never part of the discussion. 3 "experts", 10+ phone calls, several chat sessions while in the researching phase and no one had mentioned that to us. They just continued to try to talk us into removing the audit trail which our CPA did not want to do, or starting a new company which would take so much time because we have rather complex estimates (quotes) so we duplicate to make it a little easier. I tell you all of that so you understand how no one listened to us. No one actually helped us, they did enough to pacify us and get us off of the phone. All of the leg work, all of the actual solutions were done by us. So, I am telling you this so that if you are in the middle of condensing hopefully you will stumble across this and it will perhaps help.
Once we actually got the condense to work we have cut our file size in half.
