QuickBooks is at the heart of your business’ accounting function. When it’s not working, your business is not working. While QuickBooks is usually a highly stable application, there are times it can experience trouble. One of the most common of these situations is when QuickBooks won’t open.
When that happens, your business can slow to a crawl while you try to get things up and running again.
Fortunately, most QuickBooks errors like this are resolved quickly and easily. Here are the steps you should take, in order, if you can’t get QuickBooks to start:
- Reboot. If you’ve ever had to talk to a tech support person, you know that the first thing you do when your computer is acting up is to reboot. You’ve probably already done that, but it’s worth mentioning just in case.
- Make sure it’s not already open. Sometimes, you get click-happy. If you click the QuickBooks icon several times, it can try to open several instances of the program and get hung up. To see if this is the case, open the Task Manager and look for a QBW32.exe task. If it’s there, select it and click “End Task.”
- Bypass potential shortcut problems. Sometimes, the shortcut file can become corrupted. To get past this, click Start => All Programs => QuickBooks. From there, right-click on QuickBooks. Press CTRL and click on “Open.”
- Log in as an administrator. Restart your computer and log in via an account with administrator privileges in Windows. If QuickBooks runs as an administrator, consider changing permissions on your existing account or creating a new account with admin privileges.
- Run Reboot.bat. QuickBooks has a built-in utility to re-register QuickBooks in Windows. To run Reboot.bat, navigate to your QuickBooks folder and double-click the reboot.bat folder.
- Talk to your QuickBooks ProAdvisor. Proadvisors have specialized knowledge that can help you through some of these issues. Before you decide to simply wipe your QuickBooks installation and start over, check with your ProAdvisor to see if there are other solutions you can try.
The vast majority of QuickBooks errors can be recovered. Just make sure you have a regular backup of your company file in case you wind up having to reinstall and restore.
