Once you find there are no errors in the QuickBooks file, you can move on to the next step. If there are errors in the file, it is going to ask you to Rebuild the Data file. Be prepared for this process taking a really long time on a file that is older or large. Make sure when you start this process, you move your QuickBooks data file OFF of the server onto your hard drive so the process goes faster. When your data is rebuilt and you have no errors in the file, you can back it up again and save it under a different name so you always have that data to refer back to. The rest of the process goes easy – the Clean Up Company Data wizard will walk you through purging transaction history for each year and/or specific transactions that you may want to archive. When you choose to archive multiple years, it will leave the Trial Balance in the file for each fiscal year - but it will not have detailed transactions from the years that are archived.

After you run the Clean-up Company Data utility, then create a portable company file and close the QuickBooks data file. Find the Portable Company File you saved and restore it to a QBW file. Your file should have reduced in size a bit by doing this – but no guarantees! There are clean-up tools from Baystate Consulting (http://www.baystateconsulting.com/) and Karl Irvin (http://www.q2q.us/) that will help you delete transactions from a file as well.  After removing the transactions – you will run through this same process of creating a portable company file to reduce the data size of the Quickbooks file and restoring it.

Bottom line for those who just can’t seem to part ways with their old financials and get this information removed the right way - you really should have a Consultant involved so that you don't delete something you need!