QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual

Chapter 23. Keeping Your QuickBooks Data Secure

The records in QuickBooks are indispensable. They prevent you from overdrawing your checking account, help you invoice your customers and prepare your taxes, and provide the information you need to plan for the future. A company file does so much—and yet, many companies don't take the time to keep their financial data safe and secure.

Losing data to a hard disk crash is usually a shock to your system (both hardware-wise and emotionally), and rebuilding your records is inconvenient, time-consuming—and, if you hire Intuit to do it, costly. But having someone embezzle the money from your accounts could send years of hard work down the drain. Protecting your QuickBooks data takes so little time that there's no excuse for not doing it.

If you're the untrusting type or simply have no one else willing to do your bookkeeping, you can skip the discussion of creating users and setting up user permissions. The Administrator login is all you need to work on your company file—and QuickBooks creates that automatically. Although you might not let other people access your financial data, that doesn't mean that someone won't try to access it without your permission. Good security measures, such as firewalls, up-to-date antivirus software, and passwords that strangers can't guess go a long way to prevent unauthorized fiddling with your finances.

When you have other people work on your company file, security is a bit trickier. Each person who accesses your ...