Since the key words are inactive and closed, prior to purging it is very important to make all list data that is to be removed (customers, vendors, employees, chart of accounts, inventory items, etc.) “inactive”, and all transaction data that is to be removed “closed” prior to running a purge. Contrary to what many Peachtree users believe, running a year-end close does not remove any data from the system; it merely “tags” transactions as belonging to a “closed” fiscal year, and also puts them into “read only” mode, making further editing impossible.

This can be problematic in that records that are not “closed” prior to running the year end close are stuck in the database, unable to be purged because they are not “closed” and unable to be closed because they are not in an open fiscal year. In this unfortunate “Catch-22” the best recourse is frequently an outside data repair service that can use developer tools to remove the “stuck” records.

Once you have determined the set of records to be purged, we recommend that you define a “purge sequencing strategy” to determine discrete, limited sets of records to purge over multiple passes through the Peachtree database. This is particularly important if the number of journal row records in your database exceeds 250,000 (you can check this within Peachtree by going to Help | Customer Support and Service | File Statistics, and scrolling down in the “Number of Records” column to check the size of the “Jrnl Row” table).

Quantum users can efficiently process a considerably larger volume of journal row records, but even for Quantum users we recommend purging when the volume of records exceeds 750.000.

A typical “purge sequencing strategy” would first seek to identify any transaction records older than 12 to 24 months prior to the first day of the earliest open fiscal period. Thus if your earliest open fiscal period were January 2010, you would be looking for records older than 1/1/2009 (or 1/1/2008 if you want to keep more records available).

To determine the oldest records in your system, open the transaction screen into which you enter the largest number of records (sales offers, vendor invoices, purchase orders, etc.), and click on the “List” button on the toolbar. Change the drop-down filter so that it shows “All Transactions” and note the date of the earliest record displayed in the list. That is your oldest transaction.

Do this same date lookup for each transaction type for which you want to perform a purge. With this information, it should be possible to establish a “phased” approach to transaction purges. If your earliest transaction date is April of 1999 (perhaps when you initially installed Peachtree) you might want to set three (or four, depending on transaction volume) distinct date ranges for the purge within each transaction type. Thus your sequencing might look like this:

Once you have removed all of the transactions that are no longer needed in the system, one or more additional iterations of the purge routine can be made, to remove so-called “list records” (customers, vendors, etc.) that have been tagged as “inactive”. If there are no transactions attached to these inactive records, they will be quickly and easily removed from the database.

Two additional items to consider prior to initiating a purge:

1. Consider creating an “archive database” prior to purging, so that all of the data you are about to remove from the system can still be easily accessed, in read-only mode, from the archive database;
2. After each successful step in the overall purge sequence, make a Peachtree backup of the database. Thus if your purge fails for some reason after Step #5, you will not have to start all over again from step #1. Thus seems blatantly obvious, and yet is all too often ignored. Peachtree backups are fast and easy to perform, and once the full purge is completed all of those interim backup files can be safely deleted.

We have performed hundreds of purges for clients, and when followed carefully these steps will never fail to produce the desired results (sometimes with the aid of a few additional tricks we have learned over the years!). If you feel squeamish about running a purge yourself, give us a call at 610-941-2116 to discuss your database maintenance needs and request a fixed price quote.

• Sales/Invoicing defaults to accounts receivable.
• Receipts defaults to a specific cash account.
• Purchase/Receive Inventory defaults to accounts payable.
• Payments defaults to a specific cash account.

 Occasionally there may a need to change that default G/L account, on a case-by-case basis, for a particular transaction, such as receiving cash into a different cash account.

However, when you change that default G/L account for a single transaction, the next time you enter data into that transaction screen  the system “remembers”  the last default G/L account used. We have seen many instances where this can cause transactions to be posted to incorrect G/L accounts.

To avoid these “mystery posts” which can cause reconciling headaches, when entering transactions into Peachtree, especially after a previous change of the default G/L account, be sure to check that the current default G/L account is correct. If it is not, change it back to the correct default G/L account before leaving that data entry screen. By doing so Peachtree will remember that setting for the next time you enter data for that same task.

 In a multi-user environment it is advisable to always check the default G/L account, because another user may have changed it.

 If you should find a transaction with an incorrect default G/L account, you can still open the transaction and correct it for that transaction, as long as it is in an open fiscal year. Checking before you save, however, is much less painful.

Give us a call at 610-941-2116 if you would like to know more about Task Window defaults in Peachtree.

There are many different methods for accomplishing the same result in Peachtree. Choice of method can depend on whether:

• one credit card statement is paying just a single Peachtree vendor or many different vendors,
• the credit card is used for “non-Peachtree vendor” purchases,
• printing a “paper trail” of the credit card payment to attach to the vendor invoice is important,

to name just a few considerations in selecting a “best practice” for processing credit card payments to vendors in Peachtree.

We have developed a procedure which a number of our clients have successfully implemented for paying vendors via credit card. This method seems to work acceptably in many circumstances. Try it out, and modify as needed to make it work for your own particular situation.

1. Set up a “cash account” for your credit card.

Create a cash account for each credit card

2. Enter your vendor purchases as normal, charging the purchase(s) to the general ledger account(s) you would typically use for that vendor’s purchases.

3. To pay the vendor(s) invoices, go to Tasks, Select for Payment, Paper Checks.

4. Make your payment selections based on date and/or vendor ID; If paying more than a single vendor with this credit card payment, do not select any vendor on the selection screen; on the following screen you will be able to “tailor” your selections to only those vendors for whom a credit card payment has been made.

5. On the “Select for Payment” screen which opens after setting your filters, change the general ledger cash account at the top of the screen to select the “credit card payment cash account” set up in Step #1, and change the default sort method to be “vendor.”

Select the invoices to be paid

6. Select the invoices for each vendor that appear on the credit card statement, de-select all others that are not being paid by credit card, and verify that the total “checks” at the bottom of this screen agrees with the total credit card statement amount. (NOTE: these amounts will not agree if there are other charges on the credit card statement beyond vendor payments; this is not a problem, it just means that this reconciling method will not work in this instance).

7. When your selections are complete, choose to print the “checks” you have selected onto plain paper, using either a standard “Peachtree check form” or a custom-designed check form you have created to attach to all vendor invoices paid via credit card. In either case it is a good idea to use a “custom” check number, starting with the credit card vendor’s code (e.g., AMEX) and followed by some kind of logical sequence number, like the first payment on the January invoice (AMEX2011-JAN-01), and let Peachtree “auto-increment” the check numbers accordingly for this check run. (e.g., AMEX2011-JAN-02, AMEX2011-JAN-03, AMEX2011-JAN-04, etc.).

8. Now it is necessary to pay the credit card statement from your cash account, as you normally would any other invoice in Peachtree. You should of course have the credit card company set up as a vendor in Peachtree.

9. You can pay the credit card vendor directly from the “Write Checks” menu. To do so you will use one of two methods, depending on whether or not there are additional purchases on the credit card statement being paid that do not represent vendor purchases entered and paid via credit card earlier in Peachtree.

10. If only paying credit card items that have been charged to vendor invoices already “paid” in Peachtree, simply select the checking account cash account (probably the default cash account) on the upper right of the “Write Checks” screen (which will be the credit entry) and select the credit card payment cash account at the bottom left of the screen for the “expense” account. This will be the balancing debit entry, and will “zero out” the credit amount previously posted to this same account when the vendors were paid via credit card in Step #7 above.

Use "Write Checks" to pay credit card

11. If your credit card statement includes charges you are paying for “non-vendor-related” purchases, you will then need to use the “Split” button that appears to the right of the Expense Account selector, and pick the appropriate general ledger accounts for those credit card purchases, per the window below.

Split the credit card payment across multiple GL accounts

If you would like a printed copy of this credit card processing procedure (in PDF format), send an email request to info@tristardatasystems.com, with “Credit Card Processing Procedure” in the subject line of the email.

 Clicking the “Notes” button on a sales order, invoice, purchase order, or vendor invoice will open a multi-tabbed window. Typing into the “Customer or Vendor Note” tab will allow you to enter a message up to 2,000 characters in length, and will allow you to print the note on the form, either prior to or following the line items on the form. You can provide a lot more detail on your invoices by putting it into the notes field, rather than trying to add a series of “comment” lines as individual items.

 If the note is for “internal consumption only” (perhaps alerting your A/R or A/P clerk to monitor this invoice closely), type the note on the “Internal Note” tab, instead. It will stay with the transaction, but will not print on the form.

 BE CAREFUL WHEN PRESSING THE ENTER KEY. Pressing “Enter” saves the entry and closes the window. Text entered in the Notes window will wrap automatically. If you need to create a new paragraph but stay on the same note, press CTRL and ENTER at the same time to move to a new blank line but keep the window open.

 Unfortunately, Notes are “transaction-related” (i.e., attached to the record) and not “line item” related I.e., attached to a specific item), so if you need to enter a note for a specific line item and not for the record in general, you still need to use the “Comment” approach to place the message in the proper spot on the form.

 Attachments
Attachments in Peachtree work just as the name suggests: you can “attach” any electronic file (spreadsheet, photo, PDF file, Word document, etc.) to either a Peachtree transaction (e.g., an invoice, a journal entry, etc.) or to a “master record” (customer, vendor, job, etc.). Have a photo or a graphic of a particular item you are ordering? Attach the photo to the order. Need to justify a general journal adjusting entry? Attach the letter from your accountant to the entry. Want to show support for your Peachtree budget? Attach the Excel worksheet to the budget.

 A couple of “tips and bewares” when working with attachments:

1. You have to first save the record before you can add an attachment; Peachtree doesn’t know the record is there, and therefore can’t add the attachment, until you first hit the “Save” button. Then you can add the attachment to the saved record.
2. Once a file is “attached” to a Peachtree record, it exists independent of the “original” file (Peachtree makes a copy). This means that you can give the attachment a different name than the original, or can even delete the attachment, without effecting the original file. It also means, however, that any changes made to the “original” file after attaching it will not be reflected in the attachment; once attached there are two separate files, each with its own independent existence. If you need to change the original and reflect the change on the attachment, make the change, save the original, delete the attachment, and re-attach to the Peachtree record.

 For virtually everyone, Microsoft Excel is the “tool of choice” for designing and calculating budgets. Its “columns and rows” orientation make it the ideal tool for interactive, “what if” calculations. Excel, however, is not the best tool for maintaining a budget and tracking performance against “actuals”. Doing this essential step in Excel requires a lot of extra re-keying, or some complicated exports and imports. Fortunately, Peachtree plays quite nicely with Excel-based budgets these days.

 In Peachtree Premium and Quantum, you can establish as many different budgets as you need, and can select any budget to print on your financial statements to facilitate comparisons (Peachtree Complete allows only one budget). Any single budget can reflect up to four years of data: the two currently open fiscal years, plus one year prior to the earliest open year and one year following the latest open year.

 Budgeting can be performed for all of your accounts or for any range of accounts, using filters. Especially handy is the filtering available by account “type” (income statement accounts, expenses, etc.), or by account “segment” (Premium and higher only) to create department-level budgets. An existing Peachtree budget can be easily copied to a new budget, and recalculated using various formulas to test the new assumptions.

 The best thing about Peachtree’s budgeting capabilities, however, is how easily it interfaces with Excel. Import and export buttons are conveniently situated on the budgeting screen toolbar, making it a snap to get your budget data into Peachtree, and equally easy to get it out again for further work in Excel. TIP: When building your budget, first set your filters in Peachtree, then export a “blank” budget to get all of the relevant accounts quickly and easily into Excel, along with all the appropriate period column headers.

 Once you have your “baseline” data (accounts and periods) populated in Excel, do all of the normal budget construction directly in Excel, then when the budget is completed send the data back to Peachtree via a CSV file, which is simple to create in Excel (Save As…).

 It is also pretty easy to manipulate some of the budget data directly in the Peachtree budgeting screen, by using the “Autofill” button on the toolbar to complete a row, or by using the “Quick Action” buttons (Copy and Adjust) accessed via a right click of the mouse anywhere on the cell grid, to modify amounts by a fixed dollar amount, a percentage, or to round to the nearest dollar, hundreds, or thousands.

 Peachtree budgeting also works nicely with Peachtree Alerts, to automatically send a message to a selected user when any account is over budget for either a specified period or for the year-to-date budget.  With the Peachtree’s capabilities to handle attachments to records, you can even “attach” the original Excel budget to the Peachtree budget as a fool-proof “source document” audit trail.

 Peachtree won’t necessarily help you generate more income, but it can provide the tools you need for creating a good roadmap to follow – and monitor – through the twists and turns of a troubled economy.

1.  Tweak your anti-virus settings – Most anti-virus software allows you to define “exclusions” to virus checking. You should “exclude” the folder where you installed Peachtree on your local drive, as well as the folder and all subfolders on the server where your Peachtree data is stored. This will not likely put your computer in harm’s way; we have not heard of any malicious software ever infecting a Peachtree .DAT file.
2. Free up local hard drive space – You should try to make sure that you have three times the size of your largest company database or 1 Gb, whichever is greater, available as free space on your local hard drive. If Peachtree needs to create a Windows “swap” file, this is where it will be parked. Running a “disk defrag” on the local drive to optimize the available storage space can also help in some situations.
3. Edit your Peachtree global settings – There is a section on the “General” tab under the Global Settings menu that allows you to set up “smart data entry” rules. While enabling these settings can be handy and make the system more convenient to use, they can also contribute negatively to performance. Unchecking all of the checkboxes in this area may improve speed.
4. Disable Events- This is an area of Peachtree that we find hardly anyone uses, but it may still be “activated” on your system. To turn this off (which can improve performance) click on Tasks, then Action Items, then click on the “Options” button on the Action Items menu bar. From the Options menu select the Transactions tab, and uncheck any of the boxes that are checked off in the “Create Event” column.
5. Avoid duplicate transaction reference numbers – Peachtree allows you to use the same “reference number” (e.g., vendor invoice #, cash receipt ID, etc.) as long as you do not use it for the same “master record” (vendor, customer, etc.). However, using the same number over and over (e.g., “cash” for all deposits) causes the application to work harder when searching and storing information. Keeping all of your “reference numbers” unique to the greatest extent possible can improve performance. It can also make life much more pleasant in the unhappy event that you ever need to export and re-import your data; the import will sometimes reject duplicate reference numbers.

 Of course the most significant contributor to system performance is the size of your Peachtree database, and within that database the single biggest contributor is the Journal Row (JRNLROW.DAT) table within the database. This table holds ALL of your Peachtree transactions, and each time you search for a transaction record the system needs to read through that entire table to find the requested record.

 So, how big can this file safely grow to before performance becomes an issue? There is no hard and fast rule for this (still more art than science), but our general “rule of thumb” is to begin thinking about maintenance to your database when the journal row table approaches 150,000 total records, if you are using any version of Peachtree except Quantum. The more powerful Quantum product can gracefully accommodate three to four times that number of records without causing significant performance “degradation”.

 You can review the record count for all of your Peachtree tables by selecting Help | Customer Support and Service | File Statistics from the top menu bar within Peachtree.

 Once you have determined the overall size of your Peachtree database and viewed the record counts for the individual tables, you can make a judgment about purging some data. Purging is the process of physically removing selected records from the system, to shrink the overall size of the database. It can, however,  be a time consuming and technically daunting task, since there are any number of “gotchas” that can impede or abort the purge process.

We have assembled a set of instructions for performing Peachtree database purges on our website, which you can review by clicking here. In some circumstances it is more cost-effective to use an outside data repair service to fully purge records that are no longer needed in the system. And in all cases, it is good practice to make an “archive” copy of the database before starting a purge. Peachtree Premium makes the archiving process easy, but Peachtree Complete users can create “manual” database archives.

 Carefully following these “best practices” for Peachtree data storage will help you to get maximum performance from your Peachtree software.

Here are a few tips for managing your modifications to Peachtree reports and forms:

1. As soon as you begin to make changes to a standard report, change the report title from the “standard” title to something more descriptive of the specific objective you are trying to achieve (e.g., Bookkeeper’s A/R Reconciliation”). With each revision to the report, save it as a “new” version, with the version number in the title, until you have it exactly as you originally envisioned the report. Then – and only then – delete all the “earlier” versions, and change the report title to reflect what you want to appear each time you run it.

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2. When modifying Peachtree forms, include the date of the revision in the name of the form (e.g., TriStar AP Check 021508). Again, track versions with each “save” until you get the form the way you want it, then delete all the versions except the one you want to use. Retain the date in the form name so that you will be able to easily track when it was originally designed.

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3. Peachtree organizes the Reports Menu, by default, with all “custom” reports listed first within a report group, followed by all “standard” reports. Within these two groups individual reports are sorted in standard “computer sort” order, which is to say numbers (treated as text) first, followed by letters. Thus 1 and 10 come before 2, and all three come before “a”. So, if you have a desired order for your custom reports on the menu, apply a little creativity to the naming convention, using a combination of numbers and letters to achieve the desired result.