Prior to creating the accountant’s copy I would recommend that you check the starting file for any errors, and perhaps do a rebuild. Clean up any errors that show in the error log (which can be a bit cryptic, unfortunately). Some of us believe that these kinds of errors are what might be causing the merge problem later on.

And don’t let the office staff delete records or rename things while you are on the road, because if they delete something that you make a reference to in your “road” copy, this could possibly be a source of the error.

Unfortunately, I’ve not seen any analysis of what exactly causes these merge problems, so these precautions might not prevent the error.

Personally, when I’m on the road, I usually have an Internet connection available, so I use a product like LogMeIn to access my office computer to do the updates there. Which isn’t as convenient, but works.

You can get close to that report by modifying an item listing, but I can only get it to show items with a quantity <= 0 (and can’t get just negative items, so far). Export it to Excel and do more filtering.

Then at the very least the accounting program should have an exception report that generates automatically each morning at a certain time showing that kind of thing.

A bit contrived, but it does happen. There are workarounds, but they take time and make you change your procedure. Computers are suppossed to make life easier, not harder…

1. as an expense you don’t want to track specifically by vendor

2. to buy something for resale that you do not want to stock. To use it this way you have to check mark the block that says “item used in an assembly or for resale” or something like that. When you do that it opens up some more fields, COGS and sales - the screen looks just like an inventory item then. When you buy it - the cost goes to COGS or the expense account you selected - usually COGS for items being sold. Then when you sell the item the sales is posted to the income account you selected on the item screen. Since cost is posted to COGS, and income is posted to sales, the P&L will show net profit. The point being that cost of items sold is a special category in QB and in IRS reporting.

QB restricts items from pointing to this or that kind of account a lot (like the above entry). For some reason QB does not restrict you from selecting an income account when setting up a non-inventory item. Non-inventory items are supposed to be for expenses, why QB would not restrict the selection is a mystery. Use service items for income, that is what you do, you perform a service.

QB does not restrict the selection to just expenses, because in my case I buy a non-inventory part and mark it up to resell to the customer. The markup amount would be my income!