Sherry and I both have Quickbooks 2009 on our systems and we share one data file.

It’s a great system – Sherry takes care of the day to day invoicing, I can run reports, enter stock, and all those other Quickbooksey things that one does in the daily running of a business.

Sherry had been using an old Dell desktop since she started here over a year ago (I know, the cobbler’s kids have the worst shoes) and we finally built her a very nice replacement system.  All the bells and whistles, including an upgrade to Windows 7 Professional – woohoo!

So we get the new system installed, all of her data transferred over, her Outlook up and running, MS Office up and running, Mozy backup setup, etc. and we get Quickbooks installed.

When running in multiuser mode Quickbooks requires one to run a little program called Quickbooks Database Server Manager – you simply run the program and it scans your drive for Quickbooks files that you wish to share.  Easy peasy.  We ran the program, it found the data file and we shared it.

Sherry opened up our company file in Quickbooks with no problem and set Quickbooks for multi-user mode.

I head back to my office to fire up Quickbooks – I have stock to receive, invoices to print and mail, it’s time to get to work!

Alas, Quickbooks has other plans.  I can see the Quickbooks file on Sherry’s system but Quickbooks is not having any of it.  Nuh-uh.  No way.  Not gonna happen.  Quickbooks gleefully points out that it can’t open the file on Sherry’s system.  I hear sounds Nelson on The Simpsons “Ha-ha“.

Quickbooks can’t open the file – it tells me that the file is not properly setup for sharing on Sherry’s system; it can’t connect.

Hrrrmmm.

Much troubleshooting ensued.  Data file moved from Sherry’s machine to mine, new data shares setup on both systems, and so on.

What we ended up discovering was a nifty little utility from Intuit’s site for troubleshooting network connection issues from within Quickbooks.  We downloaded and ran the tool and it generated two errors for us to research.

After a bit of research we the found the cause of the issue to be……

Undocumented ports that needed to be opened at the firewall!  No really.  That was the issue.

In all of the troubleshooting and knowledge base searching at Intuit’s site nowhere did we find any mention that certain ports needed to be opened on the firewall software in order for Quickbooks to function in a multi-user environment.

It seems that the Windows 7 firewall blocks these ports by default.  The fix took all of 30 seconds to implement.  Opened up the firewall on Sherry’s system and allowed access to ports 8019 and 55333.

We are quickbooking away now – woohoo!

-Daniel Scurlock
Scurlock Systems and Associates LLC