QB 2020 R7

I couldn't tell you what causes this, but NEVER disable your UAC! If you follow the best answer from Joesem M then you open your computer up to malware and attacks. The User Account Control is there for reason, security! Why does the Quickbooks Team tell customers to disable their computer security!?!?

Yes, often.

QB programmers write for expediency and not security. The database hosting program sets QB shares to "Everyone" permission automatically and it screams if it isn't that way or cannot do that.

I'm wrestling with this same issue on an RDS with multiple users, a local company file repository, and RemoteApp.

It's infuriating. 

if the user is NOT a local admin, then having UAC off does not decrease security, it just doesn't prompt the user to put in a user/pass to do admin things (so things fail silently, which could be confusing to users, but is not a security issue)

in this case the user is not a local admin, if they were they would not get the UAC prompt and this post would not have been written

turning off UAC in this case should make the launching of the utility fail silently and the user can get on with using QB

if the user is NOT a local admin, then having UAC off does not decrease security, it just doesn't prompt the user to put in a user/pass to do admin things (so things fail silently, which could be confusing to users, but is not a security issue)

in this case the user is not a local admin, if they were they would not get the UAC prompt and this post would not have been written

turning off UAC in this case should make the launching of the utility fail silently and the user can get on with using QB

I'm interested in step 9: "Cripple/Enable Utility Application in Quick Books".  What does that mean and how do you do it?

Thanks for joining us here in the thread, @Fouber. I'll share some information about what step 9 means.

After you've turned your UAC off, you're going to restart your PC. After restarting, you'll then receive a prompted, click Yes to allow. Step 9 tells you to Enable your Utility Application (UAC) in QuickBooks Desktop.

Here's what the prompt looks like.

Here's a link here where you can look for an article that can assist you if you require any information or procedures when using QuickBooks Desktop. Help articles.

Additionally, I'll be leaving these links to help you in the future:

• Get started with QuickBooks Desktop
• Update QuickBooks Desktop to the latest release
• Install QuickBooks Database Server Manager

The Community is open 24/7 if you have other QuickBooks desktop concern. You can also notify me by leaving a comment down below. I'll make sure to respond to your queries as soon as possible. Keep safe!

Thank you for the prompt response, but I don't follow what you're saying here.

"Step 9 tells you to Enable your Utility Application (UAC) in QuickBooks Desktop."

UAC (Windows User Access Control) is not configured through Quickbooks Desktop.  And the image you posted is of a third-party app certificate approval.

Understanding the function of the Quickbooks Utility Application would be helpful.  Does it check for third party utilities trying to access Quickbooks?  Does it check for pending updates?  It clearly requires administrative rights to operate.  

Bottom line is that I can't give my users administrative rights and disabling UAC is not something I want to do.  If I can figure out what QUA is doing, I might be able to figure out some other way to disable it.

Thanks for getting back to this thread, @fouber1. I'll share some insights about the Utility application in QuickBooks Desktop (QBDT).

The main objective of User Account Control (UAC) is to enhance the security of all QuickBooks users. It protects your computer and reduces the exposure and attack surface of the operating system by initially starting with all users running in standard mode.

To understand more about the usage of a utility application, I'd suggest reaching out to our Customer Care Team. They know the full facilities and uses of utility applications and can help you right away.

Here's how you can get in touch with an agent:

1. In QuickBooks, click the Help.
2. Choose QuickBooks Desktop Help (you can also press F1).
3. In the Have a question? window, click Contact Us.
4. Enter a brief discussion with your concern, then click Continue.
5. Choose either Chat with us (Chat to a support agent) or Have us call you (Arrange a callback from a phone agent).

Please take note of our business hours to ensure we can attend to your needs.

Additionally, these guides provide an overview of setting up an user type and role as well as its restrictions:

• QuickBooks Desktop Users and Restrictions
• Create and manage roles in QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise
• Users/Roles in QuickBooks 

You can get back to me if you have other QuickBooks-related concern. To notify me, you can click the Reply button below. I'll keep an eye for your response. Keep safe! 

User Account Control (UAC) is a Windows security feature.  It was created by Microsoft - not Intuit - and it's main objective is not "to enhance the security of all QuickBooks users".  

Quickbooks Utility Application (QUA) is a Quickbooks program created by Intuit.  Josem says "If you install the utility, make sure it's on the same system where QuickBooks is", but it is not an optional program; it gets installed automatically with desktop Quickbooks.    It may cause a UAC admin popup to appear, depending on whether UAC is enabled.  Contrary to what KurtKyle posted, the popup looks like this:

The responses Inuit provides here in these forums are often more harmful than helpful.  

Any update to this issue? I would like to actually resolve the problem without decreasing security or hiding the issue by disabling notifications.

Hi,

I am stuck with this issue since couple of weeks now and unable to move forward.

We have installed a third party application/agent where QuickBooks is installed, to fetch data from QB. And now whenever we are trying get the data, the QuickBooks Utility Application popup is coming and interfering with the data extraction and we are unable to move forward.

We have changed the user account control settings and choose Never Notify to turn off UAC and restarted the system. But still the issue didn't get resolved.

9. Cripple/Enable Utility Application in Quick Books. -  this point we didn't know how to cripple/enable.

Can someone please help us on this issue. Thanks in advance.

Welcome to the Community, @sreenath-centime.

I appreciate you sharing a screenshot and the result of the troubleshooting steps shared by my colleagues above to get rid of the QuickBooks Utility Application popup. I want to make sure this issue gets resolved so you can get back to business.

Based on the screenshot you've provided, you are on the right track to removing the QuickBooks Utility Application popup. You'll just need to click the Yes button to enable the utility application in QuickBooks.

However, if you get the issue persists, I highly recommend contacting our QuickBooks Support Team. This way, they can further check on this matter and provide in-depth troubleshooting steps to get this resolved. They can also create an investigation ticket if other users are experiencing the same. To reach them, you can follow the steps below:

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

You can also check out this article for another way of reaching out to our support team and its support hours: QuickBooks Desktop Support.

As always, you can visit our QuickBooks Community help website if you need tips and related articles in the future.

You can update me here in the Community on how things go. I'll be more than happy to assist you again if you have other concerns or follow-up questions, @sreenath-centime. Have a great day and take care always.

So I would recommend selectively disabling UAC prompts for this. You can do this by editing the shortcut for the QB application (or making a batch file) and setting target to be something akin to:

cmd /min /C "set __COMPAT_LAYER=RUNASINVOKER && start "" C:\Program Files\Intuit\Quickbooks.exe"

The path above is not exact. You can get the path from your original shortcut. But this will cause a momentary flash of a command prompt as it sets this variable and launches your program. Since the UAC prompt is a programming issue that causes the UAC to prompt even though admin access is not needed, it is fine to bypass.

This is LOADS better than disabling security globally for UAC.

Thanks for the suggestion.  I ran across this fix when I was researching the issue but decided not to implement it as QB is frequently launched by double-clicking company files in our environment, bypassing the shortcut.

Here is what I finally did:

The "Quickbooks Utility Application" is actually DBManagerExe.exe.  It checks to make sure the QB services are running.  I disable these services because our company files are all on the network, but in my testing, the pop-up opens whether or not the services are running.  I renamed DBManagerExe.exe in the QB folder and replaced it with rundll32 (renaming it DBManagerExe.exe).  rundll32 is tiny and with no arguments does absolutely nothing.  Works great, but I'll probably have to redo the fix after QB updates.  Might need to write a script to handle this nightly...

Has anyone tried to change the service account the DBManagement service is using to local system account? I have read that this may potentially resolve the issue.