QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual

Setting Up an Integrated Application

Integrated applications don't read data from exported text files; they actually access your company file for information. To protect your data from programs that shouldn't read your company file, you have to tell QuickBooks which programs you do want digging into your financial data.

Letting programs access your data is something you set up with preferences. Choose Edit→Preferences, click the Integrated Applications icon, and then click the Company Preferences tab. Here, you can turn on the "Don't allow any applications to access this company file" checkbox to keep all programs out. But given the name of this section, you probably want at least one program to access your QuickBooks data.

Note

Initially, only the QuickBooks administrator can give programs access rights, but the administrator can also set up other users with that same power (page 549).

As long as the "Don't allow any applications to access this company file" checkbox is turned off, when a program tries to access your company file, QuickBooks displays an Application Certificate dialog box, in which you can specify whether to let the program look at your data, as shown in Figure 21-5.

Figure 21-5. If you are the QuickBooks administrator or another user with the permission to dole out file access, choose an option to set the program's access to the company file. Obviously, choosing No keeps ...