Archive for the ‘Windows’ Category
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6
May
2010
Intuit QuickBooks Discount Error Goes Unfixed
Unless you live in a secluded cave in the middle of nowhere, you have undoubtedly heard of a little program called QuickBooks by Intuit. This program comes in a variety of different flavors to suit your personal and/or business needs. This software can be surprisingly simple to use with little to no effort.
In a few cases when I invoice a customer, I will charge them for a product at full price and then a few lines down discount the product to the agreed upon selling price. This helps me to demonstrate the value associated with the services I provide and also allows me to charge more later if the circumstances change. QuickBooks has a special item that is setup for this very discount function.
During my normal day-to-day operations, I received a phone call from a customer that was unable to determine how I arrived at a sales tax figure. Thinking this was a simple error on the customer’s behalf I pulled up the invoice, ran the figures and was shocked when I realized that the math absolutely did not work. Wanting to get to the bottom of this, I asked to call the customer back and began trying to figure the problem out. After working with the problem for a few moments I remembered that my company has a full service plan and decided to call Intuit to report the problem. After jumping through several hoops and being transferred to a level 2 support member, I was told that this was expected behavior. The invoice in question had taxable and non-taxable items on it with the discount appearing at the very bottom of the invoice. She explained that the QuickBooks calculator added all the items up as it went along and when it encountered a discount it treated it as a payment and reduced the previous line items by a percentage.
Let see an example:
Our tax amount will be 8%.
Now we have an item that costs $1 and is taxable: $1 x 8% = $1.08
Another item for $1 that is not taxable: $1 x 0% = $1
A discount of $1 that is also taxable: $1.08 + $1 = 2.08 – $1.08 = $1
Now here is a screen shot from QuickBooks with the same problem:
(Click to enlarge)
As you can see, QuickBooks manages to figure this total to be $1.04. She then explained that the work around to this problem was to add all of the taxable items first, then use the taxable discount and finally add the non-taxable items and a non-taxable discount if needed. I asked if this was going to be improved and was told that I could submit this as a suggestion for a future version as an improvement.
This just goes to show you that you can’t always trust shiny software even if you pay for it and you should always double check your math.
GHTime Code(s): 64a48 nc 08e28
9
Nov
2009
Windows XP Roaming Profile Synchronization Issues
Roaming profiles allow us to access files that we often use on any computer joined to the network, easily replace old computers, and provide greater network security. There are on occasion, special circumstances that cause the log-on/log-off synchronization process of these profiles to fail. Generally when this happens the icon pictured fourth from the left below will appear in the task bar.
This causes your roaming profile to refuse to load or breaks NetBIOS connections even after a reboot of the system. You are still able to connect to network shares if you use the ip address of the network computer(s). To correct this problem, go to My Computer=>Tools=>Folder Options=>Offline Files. This will open the screen pictured below.
Now what you need to do is hold down Ctrl+Shift and click on Delete Files. Answer yes to the confirmation prompt, click ok and then restart your computer. After the restart, you will find that your profile loads normally and there are no more connection issues involving NetBIOS names.
GHTime Code(s): a6f56 c3749 ab27a
7
Nov
2009
Windows XP – Reclaim Lost Hard Drive Space
The network I administer at work has an even mix of new and old computers. The problem with the older computers are the small hard drives and low amount of memory. I constantly have employees telling me that their computers are running slower than normal and that they are getting low resources error messages.
Below are the steps I use to free up space on these machines:
- Click Start => My Computer
- Now we want to right click on the drive that Windows is installed on and click on Properties.
- Once the properties dialog opens, click on Disk Cleanup. (This will take a few seconds to minutes to load)
The next steps require a little more explanation.
Before we use Disk Cleanup to get rid of any files, let’s click on the more options tab. This tab allows us to remove components, installed programs that we don’t use and old system restore points. Assuming you have system restore enabled, which by default it is, you will be able to regain a considerable amount of space by selecting this option.
Look at the amount of free space you have and remember the number. Now click on the Clean Up button for System Restore and answer yes to the prompt. You will not see any progress bar or get confirmation that this operation has completed. Wait about 10 seconds and view your free space again. Did the number change? When I did this on my computer I regained a little over 3 gigs!
Now click back on the Disk Cleanup tab. This tab gives us a list of file types with the amount of space they take up plus their descriptions down below. Click on each one to find out what they do to help you decide if you should delete them or not. I typically delete everything except for Office setup files and I don’t compress old files. Once you have the files you want to remove selected click on ok and answer yes to the prompt.
That’s pretty much sums up the process I use to reclaim drive space on Windows XP machines.
GHTime Code(s): 25e9a 52ce5
6
Nov
2009
Microsoft Exchange Recovery Mode and How to Fix it
I had a user this week that was experiencing trouble with Outlook. Every time they opened the program they received a prompt similar to the one below.
-
Exchange is currently in recovery mode. You can either connect to your Exchange server using the network, work offline, or cancel this logon.
Not only was the prompt annoying, the shared calendar and contacts crashed the program whenever you tried to access them.
After doing some digging I found a solution that fixed the problem.
- Start Outlook and select Connect.
- On the Tools menu, click E-mail Accounts.
- Click View or change existing e-mail accounts, and then click Next.
- Click the Microsoft Exchange Server account, and then click Change.
- Click More Settings, and then click Advanced.
- Clear the Use Cached Exchange Mode check box, and then click Apply.
- Instead of exiting Outlook at this point click Offline Folder File Settings, and then click Disable Offline Use.
- Click Yes to the prompt, OK, Next, and Finish
- Close Outlook and start it again.
- Repeat steps 1-5
- Now reselect the Use Cached Exchange Mode check box, exit, and then restart Outlook.
That’s it now Outlook will no longer give the prompt and everything will be back to normal.
GHTime Code(s): 8a2b1 09c54 nc
13
Oct
2009
Quickly Rename Folders and Files in Windows for Free
Have you ever needed to rename a bulk quantity of files and/or folders? In my day to day life, I use template folder structures to contain various aspects of job information. Before these folders are usable, I must add a unique job name to the beginning of the folder and/or file name to make searching easier. This renaming task can quickly become very tedious and time consuming.
Thanks to Denis Kozlov over at [den4b] there is a solution that saves loads of time and effort. The program is called, ReNamer and it allows us to select a list of files and/or folders and perform various renaming operations on them.
Since the task at hand is to work on already designed folder structures, all I need to do is find a method that does the job and save the preset for the different types folder structures. I chose to use a delete rule to remove the generic job name and then an insert rule to insert a unique job name.
After going through a few short test runs, I came up with a working solution that I was able to
save, customize and slightly change to suit other needs.
If you have similar renaming needs, check out this
program and I’m sure you will agree it is definitely worth your time.