File Maintenance in Hosted Reckon

Simon Denham

Currently, Our company file [hosted locally] needs verifying and rebuilding on a routine basis. Eventually the file gets too large [<600Mb] and performance is severely compromised, Requiring a new file to be created.

Is this behaviour still evident with the file in Reckon Hosted?

cheers

Simon

Omar_ReckonLtd

Hi Simon,

A file that is less than 600MB should not have any significant performance degradation.

We've seen files larger than 1GB which clients are still using successfully (even 4GB has been seen in use in the wild, though that file was visibly slower when generating reports).

Where users may experience a performance hit, whether on Reckon Accounts desktop or Reckon Accounts Hosted, is when the file is used in Multi-User mode.

Essentially you can compare specific tasks in both modes on your file to see what impact being in multi-user mode has on your file.

The computing resources on a Hosted session will likely not be a high compared to a dedicated desktop computer, so that would need to be taken into consideration if you are trying to compare desktop vs hosted performance.

If your data file at less than 600MB is not as smooth in operation as you would like, you may need to consider what your current computer that you are using it on is like in terms of its OS, CPU, GPU, RAM, HDD or SSD, etc.

Best to actually create a Hosted 30 day trial account, upload a copy of you actual QBW file or a QBB and restore it there.

Then you can perform the same tasks in both single-user mode or multi-user mode (create multiple trial accounts required).

See if the performance is essentially similar to your desktop, or better.

If the performance of your current data file is essentially the same on your local computer as on the Hosted platform, then consider the other benefits of the Hosted platform such as accessibility of the data file and the program on any computer via a web-browser, being able to share the file with your accountant and work on it simultaneously, etc

If the performance of your current data file is better on the Hosted platform, then consider the costs of moving to Hosted vs upgrading your local PC's

Verifying a data file is an important part of the file integrity checking maintenance process.

Normally if you are backing up the file using the built-in backup function of the Reckon Account program, you can choose to enable the 'complete verification' option.

If you enable it and you are backing up regularly, when there are no errors detected the backup will proceed as normal and the "TLG" file gets reset. https://help.reckon.com/article/87mkjxf1fa-how-to-reset-a-tlg-file

If you do not have that 'complete verification' option enabled in your backup preferences, then that TLG file will continue to grow and grow which can impact the time it takes to create a backup but also can affect performance when it gets really large (sometimes significantly larger in size than the QBW company data file itself).

A rebuild would only need to be performed if an error had been detected during the verify data / verification stage.

If you regularly are detecting problems and having to perform a rebuild, it may be a good idea to determine what those errors are that are being detected which is recorded also on the QBWIN.LOG (error log file) and consult with one of our technicians for additional troubleshooting.

If the technician determines the issue is a bigger problem, they can escalate the case to the Data Recovery Team for more in-depth analysis.