QB Accountant 2021 crashes when opening payroll

Thanks for reaching out to the QuickBooks Community page, @alorshbough.

I can help you further with this, but I need to make sure I have the exact information of the issue. Are you getting a Unable to read QBCapital config value isQBCapitalEnabledForPayrollCenter from DCE error when accessing the Employee Center? If so, this is an ongoing issue for QuickBooks Desktop Payroll. Our engineers are aware of this and are now working on a fix.

To get notifications about the investigation and the fix, please contact our payroll support to add your email. Refer to this article to learn more about our contact options and support availability: Contact QuickBooks Desktop support

If you're not getting this error and the company file is up-to-date, try repairing the program. This will help resolve crashing and certificate issues with the software.

Here are the steps to do it:

1. Create a back up your company file beforehand to avoid any accidental data loss.
2. Reboot the computer and tap the Windows Start menu.
3. Find Control Panel on the search field or select it from the list.
4. Press Programs and Features then Uninstall a Program.

   Note: If you don't see Programs and Features, select Programs instead. Then select Program and Features.

5. Pick QuickBooks from the list of Programs, then press Uninstall/Change.
6. Click on Continue, or Next. then Repair.
7. Press Next again then wait for the tool to start its diagnosis.
8. Hit Finish when done.

To learn more about repairing QuickBooks and its complete steps, go to this link: Repair your QuickBooks Desktop for Windows.

After the repair, run QuickBooks as Admin. Do this by right-clicking the QuickBooks icon in the desktop and selecting Run as Administrator.

If you already tried everything without positive results, I'd recommend that you still reach out with our Technical Support Team using the link above. You may request to escalate the case to our Data Services department to check your company file and identify what's causing the crashing behavior.

I want to make sure your concern is fully addressed and I'm here to provide further assistance if you need any. Have a great rest of the week!

The error I get says QuickBooks - Unrecoverable Error. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please help the QuickBooks team eliminate this issue by providing us with the following information. Then it wants me to put in the steps that caused this. I can hit send or Don't Send. This first started happening two weeks ago. I ended up uninstalling QB and reinstalling. I tried renaming the QB user file as suggested in other posts. After that, QB wouldn't even open. I reinstalled QB, still wouldn't open. I created a new user profile. Then it worked, but that messed up other things so in the end after many hours, I ended up wiping my whole computer and doing a clean install of Windows. I go to set everything back up. QB works fine and then I click on Payroll and I get the same error. 

I appreciate the time and efforts you exerted to get rid of the Unrecoverable Error, @alorshbough.

We currently have reported issues that QuickBooks Dekstop users are getting Unrecoverable Error when accessing payroll or employee's center. Rest assured, our product engineers are diligently working for a permanent fix on this issue.

To ensure you'll get an update about the resolution status, I recommend contacting our QuickBooks Support Team. This way, they can add your company to the list of affected users and provide this investigation number for easy tracking: INV-46111. To reach them, please follow the steps below:

1. Open your QuickBooks Desktop.
2. Go to the Help icon and select QuickBooks Desktop Help.
3. Click Contact Us.
4. Write your concerns in the description box, then select Continue.
5. Select which one of the support options you'd like to use.

While our engineers are working on this, you may want to run employee and payroll reports. This way, you can review the payroll data created in your QBDT.

Thank you for your patience while we work for a fix. Please know that you can always get back to this post if you need further assistance running payroll in QBDT. I'll be more than happy to assist you again.

This is super frustrating because I have payroll to run on Monday and I can't even do that. I only have this issue in my own company file and not any other files. There isn't any fix for this?

Thanks for following up with the Community, alorshbough. This certainly isn't the experience I want you to have.
 

The Unrecoverable Error you're encountering is currently being investigated by Intuit's Product Investigations team. They're diligently working on a solution to solve this issue. To be notified of any updates relating to the investigation, I'd recommend getting in touch with our Customer Care team and referencing the investigation's case number (INV-46111). They'll be able to pull up your account in a secure environment, conduct further research, and add you to Intuit's list of affected users.
 

Detailed steps for reaching them can be found in Mark_R's post. Be sure to review their support hours as well, that way you'll know when agents are available.
 

Please don't hesitate to send a reply if there's any additional questions. Have a lovely day!

I have the same issue and it seems to have started after the last payroll update.

I went through all the troubleshooting steps and finally Intuit tech support said they thought it was a file issue.  Got my "fixed" file back but they couldn't find anything wrong and still the same error.  I removed and clean install .. same issue.

Can't do anything right now except wait for them to fix it!

I have the same issue - did you get any results/fixes???

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@alorshbough wrote:

We get and "unrecoverable error" and QB aborts every time we try to access an employee record.  We've had this error come up before many times in the past years.  We've done all sorts of things to attempt fixing it.  Sometimes we think we have found how to fix the problem, but when we do the same thing another time, it does not fix the problem.  

QB support says they are aware of this problem and are working on the problem.  HOWEVER, THIS HAS BEEN GOING ON FOR YEARS!!! NOW.  I don't think QB is really doing anything about this.  They have known of this issue for YEARS!  Yet we are still getting the same error and QB does not know how to fix it.  Horrible support, in my opinion.

We have the same problem again now and have tried everything we can think of to no avail.  Can't access employees.

I had this exact problem with a client today.

I ended up

1. moving the company file to a new location 
2. right click on the folder that contains the company file, go to permissions and make sure every user has all possible permissions.
3. insuring there was at least 25GB of free space on that location
4. created a new folder called OtherStuff and moved all non-company files into that folder.  That should leave only 4 files.  The company file plus these files of the same name *.qbw, *.ND and *.TLG 
5. delete the files that have the extensions ND and TLG as QuickBooks will automatically recreate those.  That will leave you only 2 files.
6. ran QuickBooks as Administrator just as an added effort to give the QB program as much access as possible.

Solved.  Problem went away and this was AFTER 2 hours of tech support and being told to send the company file in for x days of work.

I will try this! Thank you!! Tech support told me to create a new user which works, but I can’t use the Admin log in for payroll. 

Just to be clear, the above solution was not to solve any kind of Login / User problem. 

It was to solve a problem with the program crashing when Payroll or the Employees center was opened.