Character fields

Not sure if this goes to the right place for feedback since this is a community forum (of users), but there are QB people here who respond and will tell you where to send feedback.  I looked at the attachment you sent and would like to try to help with suggestions if I can.  I am curious what you are using that would require more characters than those.  Can you share any examples with us? 

For example, for Accounts, you really only need 4 digits if you setup right, give you 9999 accounts.

Well I searched all of Google and could not find one support email address for QB of where to send feedback to, so I thought I'd post it here in case anyone else has the same feelings and could offer up some information that I may be unaware of.  

But to reply to your comment, in our company we list our Customers by their official company name, and quite often these corporations are subsidiaries of larger companies, and need to be officially written as (for example) "Immaculate Percussion Steel Corporation Inc., dba Hemlock Gates & Equipment Co., Inc." - - that alone is about 86 characters. To date, we have been abbreviating them, which is ok for some but causes great confusion for others.

Such as, (for example) "Puget Sound Precision Steel Operators Fabrication Co." and "Puget Sound Precision Steel Operators & Fabricators, Inc."  both abbreviated as "PS Precision Steel Operators Fab" - and Lord forbid if one with a long name like that gets bought out by a bigger company, then I still have to refer to the old name in my system, such as: "Markinson Corporation Inc.  (formerly PS Precision Op Steel Fab)". 

I mean, what would it hurt the developers at QB to let us have longer fields, really?  I would really love to hear someone tell me I am asking for something ridiculous.

Wow, those are some really long names, I see why you are asking now.  I am maybe the opposite in that I like to use company acronymns  whenever possible, like one of my longer client names is:

"Channel Marker Technologies, Inc." but they go by CMT.  I understand if you are writing checks or doing legal documents, perhaps you need the longer names on some things, but not so sure on the dba ones, because dba (doing business as) Hemlock Gates & Equipment Co., Inc., means that is the name they want to use, so you should not need to show anything before the "dba" on anything but of course, I am not the person to decide this for you, but you might want to double check on that. I have been through multiple company acquisitions and our company name did change but we only had to use one at a time. Like we were Horizons Tech acquired by Titan Corp then L-3 Commun.  I think there are several considerations with length of fields for example if you actually printing checks, the line for payee is only so long on a check, so abbreviating might be better than cutting off at the end.  I don't think your request is ridiculous but I would not hold your breath to see that change, especially since you cannot find anywhere to submit feedback online.

Thank you QB Team!  I saw this article before but the first time I read it, I did not get that I can go into Preferences and enter in these numbers to achieve the longest limits. Still, I do feel these are too short (for our purposes). Thank you for this great answer and acknowledging my post. It's much appreciated!!

Yes Terri, we do in our business need to use both names when we have a dba. The reason is, because this company was acquired many years ago after already being in business over 50 years. There were 2 branches, and customers were split among each branch in an agreement of the sale. The other branch was purchased by a separate company, and is "friendly competition". Therefore, we need to retain the company names of the original files for reference purposes during the invoice process. Many customers get our 2 branches confused with each other, as we used to have the same corporation name. When a customer calls, we need to be able to tell if they are meaning to call the other branch instead, and the easiest way is to reference the parent company name, which is still in our database, yet the dba we deal with is our actual customer. We don't like to merge records because we prefer orders prior to the resale stay as is, in original form. This is just one example. There are many more reasons, too long to write in this thread. 

Hi there, @EmeraldOffice.

Allow me to step in for a moment and let you know we care about your business.

I'll also be sending feedback on your behalf so that your request to increase the character fields limitation will get more votes. We're constantly looking for great product suggestions from customers like you. I also believe that there are a lot of businesses that need this modification.

As we have new and relevant information, we will communicate that out, EmeraldOffice.

You can visit the Community again if you have other QuickBooks inquiry. See you around!

@EmeraldOffice - Thanks for sharing. I do know that acquisitions can get complicated and messy as I have been through a few.  My oldest client is ADT (where T stands for Telegraph) in biz 125 years.

Certainly I do not know enough about your business and would never try to advise on any changes.

What I have found on sites like this where I may see questions sitting open/unanswered for months, is if I respond with a bad answer, partial answer, or just my opinion or preference as I did here, you get almost immediate response to correct me and hopefully to help you.

Thank you. I found the article helpful, but no instructions on exactly where I need to go in my system to make sure these fields are the longest they can be. For example, in Account Name (which is my biggest issue), where are the instructions on how to maximize this character field? What do I click on? Where do I change it?

One reply above said this is under "Preferences."

There is a lot under "Preferences". I am an experienced computer user, yet looked in every section and could not find where to elongate these fields.

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@Teri wrote:

One reply above said this is under "Preferences."

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I cannot find where in "Preferences" to change the character limitations and could find no instructions online. Please help.

Thanks for letting me know this isn't available in desktop. Very sad. But I'm glad you will send my feedback. I must not be the only customer who is frustrated by this. 

I agree. It is way too short. We integrate with Tsheets and they support 64 characters for a name. I think it should be at least match that since they are both Intuit companies. Very frustrating.

Thanks for sharing your feedback here in the QuickBooks Community, @gerryran.

I understand how increasing the character fields in QuickBooks Desktop would be helpful for you. Since this option isn't available as of the moment, I'll make sure to take note of your request and will update you once we receive product enhancement update about the availability of this feature.

In the meantime, I'd suggest visiting our QuickBooks Desktop New Features regularly. This way you'll be updated with the latest news and updates including product improvements. Just simply go to the Help menu bar, select New Features then click New Feature Tour. 

For additional reference, you may want to check this article to learn more about the character limitations for fields in QuickBooks. 

Please know that you're always welcome to post if you have any other concerns about your QuickBooks service. I'll be around to help you out. Have a good one. 

It's painful , the same issue is what the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria is facing.  thery are presently thinking of moving to sage. I wonder why quickbooks would ignore such an important issue

Check numbers need to be longer

For example, my bank uses 18 characters for an debit card transaction number.  Quickbooks truncates this to 11 characters.  The result (problem because of QB poor design for the 21st century) I I get duplicate check numbers, because several recent debit card transaction used 11 leading zeros.

Not all payments against a checking account are checks in the 1950s sense. Intuit, please join the 21st century

Also, PayPal transactions are now 17 bytes.  Please make the check field a lot larger, so you don't need to expand it again the next time one of the e-Commerce services goes for yet a longer reference number

Hi gary47290a,

I appreciate your time and effort in letting us know the things that we can improve in QuickBooks. I'll be taking note of this and pass this along to our product team. 

This way, they'll be able to prioritize this for future product updates. For more information about character limitations, please check this article: Character Limitations For Fields In QuickBooks.

If there's anything else that you need, feel free to let us know. We're always right here to assist. 

Wow you are actually tracking debit card transaction numbers in QB.  I have never heard of that.  You must have thousands of monthly bank transactions. Just curious, what do you use them for?  Do they not show on your bank statement?  I have done accounting for almost 40 years and have never used one of those numbers, so I am very curious to understand how you would use them? When I used QBO, I always deleted those, but hate to think I was missing out on keeping those. 

Oh my on Sage.  Tell them to closely check id the system will actually do what they think they need.

Teri,

I am treasurer for a non-profit, in the arts. The debit card transactions are things we buy, not payments to us. We have only a few dozen of these a month. I need to enter them individually, so I can allocate to the approporiat cost account.

40 or 50 years ago, these transactions would have been paper checks to our vendors, which is why I am so peeved at Intuit. Quickbooks seems to think the financial world hadn't changed since the 50s.

One note: This year, for the first time, we had a small Gift Boutique at an event (about 300 transactions over 3 weekends). I aggregated the payments made to us in PayPal and entered one transaction per day just to track merchandise sales, PayPal fee, and sales tax collected. 

(Check out the Excel function sumifs - It was a brilliant time-saving solution that was better than entering a lot of line level details that I will never need in my financials.)

Gary