Hi Carol B,

Thanks for posting on the community again!

I'm afraid that having reached the list limit of 14,500 in QuickBooks desktop your options are limited. The 2 options which have been mentioned to you so far are possibilities, namely...

1) Exporting your company data to QuickBooks online, where there is theoretically no list limit

2) Starting a brand new QuickBooks company file in QuickBooks desktop, with opening balance and creating only customers/suppliers/ items you need at this time

Of course I know you would much rather keep your current company file, and there is a method by which this may be achieved, albeit a pretty manual one.

Your Names, such as Customers/Suppliers/ employees, and items such as Stock items/non stock items cannot be deleted from QuickBooks if there are any transactions relating to them (Which in most cases there are) without deleting these transactions themselves.

But instead, what you can do is find old names/ Items which are no longer used, and change two of them at a time to have the same name E.G changing two not used stock items in the item list to 'unused'. Once you do this on two old records QuickBooks desktop will ask you if you want to merge the two. If you select yes and merge them, you are effectively turning 14,500 items/names to 14,499 items freeing up another one to be created.

I do appreciate the method suggested is manual, and will take time, but it would allow you to keep running your current company file.

If you have any questions on the above, please don't hesitate to post back.

Thanks.

Chris.