QuickBooks 2012: The Missing Manual

Chapter 26. Keeping Your QuickBooks Data Secure

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

Losing data to a hard disk crash is a shock to your financial system as well as your computer’s. But having someone embezzle 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. (In addition to QuickBooks security, don’t forget common-sense security like locking the door to your office.)

If you’re the untrusting type or simply have no one else willing to do your bookkeeping, you can skip this chapter’s 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 like firewalls, up-to-date antivirus software, and passwords that strangers can’t guess go a long way toward preventing unauthorized fiddling with your finances.

When you have several people working on your company file, security is a bit trickier. Each person ...