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Maintaining Good Accounting Controls
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After you have set up the multiple users, however, you can install the Quick-
Books program on other personal computers and then — assuming that
these personal computers all connect to a Windows network — use those
other copies of QuickBooks to access the QuickBooks data file stored on the
first or principal computer. (Book VII, Chapter 1 describes how to build a
simple Windows peer-to-peer network.)
To use QuickBooks in an environment of simultaneous use by multiple users,
you also need to tell QuickBooks that this simultaneous use is okay. To do
this, choose the File➪Switch to Multi-User Mode command. If you later want
to turn off this Multi-User Mode, you choose the File➪Switch to Single User
Mode command.
QuickBooks supports simultaneous use by multiple users through a technol-
ogy called record locking, which locks all the records that you’re working
with, but not the entire QuickBooks data file. For example, if you want to
work with company A and some other user wants to work with company B,
that’s okay. QuickBooks allows that. What you can’t do, however, is work on
both company A or company B at the same time. This would mean that
you’re working with the same customer record.
You can’t install the same copy of QuickBooks on multiple machines and
legally have a multiple user QuickBooks system. You must purchase a copy
of QuickBooks for each machine on which QuickBooks is installed. Note,
however, that Intuit does sell some multiple versions of QuickBooks where
you actually buy five licenses in one box of QuickBooks. (QuickBooks sup-
ports multiple user networks with up to five simultaneous users.)
A common setting in which you may want to have several QuickBooks users
is for sales representatives in your firm who prepare invoices or prepare
bids for customers. In this case, you may want to have each salesperson set
up on QuickBooks. Note, however, that these sales people should only have
the capability to create an invoice or perhaps create and print an invoice
estimate. For reasons discussed more fully in the next section of this chap-
ter, you want to be very careful about allowing inexperienced accounting
users full access to the accounting system.
Maintaining Good Accounting Controls
In the preceding paragraphs of this chapter, I talk about how QuickBooks
allows for multiple users. Many businesses, after they grow to a certain size,
do need to support multiple users with access to accounting information
and the capability, in some cases, to create accounting transactions. Unfor-
tunately, multiple accounting system users create risk for the business
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