Time Travel in QuickBooks

Here’s some news: QuickBooks does not have a time travel feature. Several questions this week have illustrated the need to point this out. While it’s easy enough to fix most anything that is entered incorrectly in QB, it’s still important to be careful when entering transactions. One end user wanted to go back a week in time, exclaiming, “If I can just erase the past week, before it all went bad, I could start over from there.” Another asked, “Can I go back two hours? I deleted transactions that I want back.”

Other than restoring from a backup, there’s no way to go back in time. This has been true for as long as I can remember, and if it changes I hope someone lets me know. In the meantime, we’re stuck with the current reality, which is that once transactions are entered, they’re there, and once transactions are deleted, they’re deleted, which harkens back to several other questions this week along the lines of, “I deleted some transactions by mistake, can I undelete them?”

It would be so convenient if life came with an undelete button, like Microsoft Word, but in accounting software, undo is not really an option. If a transaction is deleted and you want it back, you must go back in and recreate it. I could make an analogy to life, but that would mean straying from the topic of this post, which has little to do with life philosophy and more to do with QuickBooks.

So what do we do, if we can’t go back in time, and we can’t undo?

We back up frequently, just in case. There are ways to set your software to automatically back up, and systems to ensure you always have a current backup. It’s one of those things that people tend not to think about, until they’re wishing they had a backup. It may not make it possible to travel back in time, but it does make it possible to erase what happened in that period of time and start over again. Of course, like life, then you have to hurry to catch up, but that’s okay, it keeps us on our toes.

Don’t delete transactions until you know why you’re deleting them. This isn’t nearly as obvious as you might think, based on the questions I’ve seen from QB users. If you’re not sure, void the transactions instead. Then you have a better record of what was there, especially if you make notes in the transaction about why it was voided. I recommend my clients always void instead of delete. Deletion is so . . . permanent.
Close your period when you’re done with it so nothing can be done to change it without a password. It’s so easy to set that up, but even easier to change a transaction in a prior period that can cause problems.

Check your audit trail. Under Reports, Accountant and Taxes, we find the Audit Trail. This is to find the transactions that have been deleted, changed, added, etc. It’s there for a reason. If you have multiple users, it will tell you who did what. Don’t let everyone use Admin – no way of telling who did what then.

Taking a few simple steps can make your usage of QB safer, keep your data intact, and keep you from wondering what to do next, at least regarding QuickBooks. It’s a start.