According to one of the Quickbooks Developer,
“QuickBooks Pro and Premier are built upon a smaller version of the Sybase database than their big brother, Enterprise. As a result, there are some significant limitations when it comes to list size in Pro and Premier.
Two of these list limitations involve the “names” (Employees, Customers, Vendors and Other Names) lists. Individually, each of these four lists is limited to 10,500 names. However, as if that isn’t small enough, the combined limitation for all of these names is 14,500.
As you approach either the individual names list limitation or the combined names list limitation, QuickBooks begins to take longer to record each new name you’re attempting to add. Finally, one day you reach the limit, and QuickBooks simply will no longer accept new entries.
Similarly, the Items list in QuickBooks Pro/Premier also has a 14,500 entry limitation. Many less prominent lists in Pro/Premier have limitations of 10,000 names or fewer.
Many small businesses that start out with Pro/Premier move right along from year to year without any problems, until one day they no longer can enter list data. It might be their customers/jobs, their vendors or the combination of total names.
On the other hand, it might be their items. It really doesn’t take very long over the course of time to accumulate 14,500 items within your lists if you frequently change the merchandise you sell.”
Now, if you didn’t know, QuickBooks Pro and Premier Editions, as mentioned above, have a limit of how many names and items they can contain in one set of company books.
If you add up all your customers, vendors, accounts, employees, etc., that number has to stay below 14,500. Likewise, you can only have up to 14,500 items, including inventory items, in the Pro and Premier editions.
To see how many you have, open your company in QuickBooks and then press the F2 key. In the right-hand column of information, you’ll see your counts.
Once you get up to the 14,500 limit, you basically have three choices:
1. Upgrade to Enterprise Series. Your data will convert immediately, and that ceiling goes up to 1,000,000 names and 1,000,000 items.
2. Have your company SuperCondense. This is a database consulting service we provide to QuickBooks users.
One of your options when you get your file SuperCondensed is to have old, unused customers and/or items removed from your file. This can free up thousands of spaces in your file for new accounts or items. The SuperCondensed file also has the advantage of being much smaller and faster than the original.
3. Consolidate old accounts. Let’s say you have a ton of old unused customer accounts. Rename one of them to “Unused”. Then rename another old customer to “Unused”. It will ask you if you want to merge the two accounts. Say Yes. You then have one less name in QuickBooks, so you can add a new customer (or other kind of) account in its place. You can merge as many old customers to “Unused” as you want to free up space for new customers. Merging accounts is a non-reversible action in QuickBooks, so make sure before you merge.
Have you ever bumped up against this limit? How did you resolve it? If you’re having problems with your QuickBooks data, E-tech can fix it. Please click https://e-tech.ca/022-Quickbooks-Condense-Cleanup-Optimize-Service.asp & https://e-tech.ca/Quickbooks-List-Reduction-Service.aspx