QB POS Errors

We were contacted by one of our retail boutique customers who uses the QuickBooks Point of Sale (QBPOS) and the QuickBooks Financial Pro software.

Issue: This morning they made a sale and ran the customer’s credit card for that particular amount. Right when they swiped the card, their internet went out. As you can imagine, the customer quickly started verifying whether or not the charge went through. 

The client first called American Express since that’s who the client has their account with. The representative confirmed that the credit card transaction went through. Then, she checked their QBPOS but the transaction wasn’t showing in their Sales History. She also ran an End of Day report and the charge wasn’t captured. That's when she contacted us.

Solution: In QBPOS, she can first try to look up the transaction by customer name or by the sale amount. If it’s not there, she should call the Intuit Merchant Services department to verify whether or not the charge went through. In this customer’s case, she called AMEX and they confirmed the charge but it’s always a best practice to contact Intuit since that is their Merchant Service Provider.
As long as the charge went through, she should manually enter that particular sale in QBPOS. Since Intuit is their Merchant Service Provider, they first need to log out from the merchant account. Then, make the manual sale in QBPOS. After the sale is made, log back into the Intuit merchant account. The reason she needs to log out of the Intuit merchant account is so she doesn’t charge the customer’s credit card again. If the charge never went through in the first place, then she can process the transaction as usual.

Q &A with Will English:
One of Will’s colleagues, a QuickBooks consultant, has a client with POS V6.0 multi-store who is moving it to new machines.

Colleague:  I have a client who has V6.0 multi-store and is moving it to new machines. When their I.T. installed the software on the headquarters machine, it says that it is the headquarters in the preferences but if you go to the help>about it says it is a client. How do I fix that? Uninstall and reinstall?

William English:  So we need to be clear about terms. HQ's refers to the location and when you install the software. It only asks if it is a server or client. The company file is how you determine if a company is the HQ or a remote file. So, if you go into preferences, company and then multi-store, it will tell you if you are an HQ file or a remote even if you are on a client machine.

Colleague:  So then the issue is in the install? Sorry, since I didn't install it and haven't seen this before I am slightly confused. I cannot see the backup and restore under the utilities even when signed in as sysadmin which is why I was looking to see what store it thought it was.

William English:  Mostly you are at a client machine. Back-up and restore is only on the server. Probably what happened is the IT company moved the server machine on you, especially if they were installing a file server.

Colleague:  Okay, so I just need to uninstall and reinstall it since the location we are talking about should be the server?

William English: You need to also make sure you have the most current file backup to restore once you reinstall as server, as if there were any transactions entered while file was on different machine.

Many times our clients have issues arise in QuickBooks that we can quickly resolve by communicating through email or by phone. One of our clients emailed Will with the following issue and his response follows.

Q: The girls rang in a sale with a quantity of like 60000 but they changed the price to the correct price for 1 item, so the amount of the receipt was right. I did a return receipt and put it to the customer account and then a new sale with the corrected quantity, so the quantity is right but the receipt won’t upload to financial because there is an error due to the quantity issue in the receipts for the original sale and return. How do I force this receipt through so I can deposit the $$$ in QuickBooks correctly? I don’t want to reverse it because then the charge is voided.

A: If you click on the ‘I Want To’ menu and choose ‘View Financial History’, you will see a screen that allows you to mark as successfully sent. That will fix the error.

Will recently had a client who could not connect the client workstation to the server workstation in V10 and here is how he fixed it:

After looking at all of the normal things, he found that a Windows update had turned off the public file sharing in Win7.  In Win 7, you need to make sure that network discovery and public folder sharing are both turned on. These options can be found in the Network and Sharing section of the control panel.

Once we corrected the permissions issue, we were still not able to connect.  We then switched back to single user mode (a new feature in V10 found in the file menu) and switched back to multi-user.  Problem fixed.
 

Q. Our POS has been adding tax twice to sales and it has created two issues. One, the sales receipt still shows a balance due and second, the sales tax liability is inflated. How do I correct this and delete the remaining balances showing due?

A. Most Likely someone changed the POS tax to a percentage and now it is using both the tax that you set up in POS as well as POS tax.  POS tax is a placeholder created to occupy the tax code field on the sales receipt and should be at a zero rate.  If this is the case, change it back and when it asks if you want to change previous transactions, say yes.
 

Occassionally there will be issues with any product. William English received the following question.
Q: I have a customer that is having a problem with her POS client crashing when she tries to load it. It starts checking the licenses and some time during that process it encounters an error and crashes. I have reinstalled the dot net updates and also reinstalled the POS using a separate license. still having the problem.

His answer was: This is a problem with a firewall blocking the entitlement client.  If you are using Norton, the problem is worst as just turning off the firewall will still leave components in place.  If you are using a hardware firewall (most routers and modems include this) there is no reason to use a software firewall beyond Windows firewall and even then it is not needed. This is a firewall permissions issue.  In Win 7, we have gotten it to work by adding the IP and computer name to the hosts file.  If you are using any firewall other than Windows, all bets are off.
 

Q: I upgraded to QBPOS v10 Pro.  After a QBPOS update, I closed the program, then tried to reopen/restart the program and received QBPOSSHELL stopped working. 

A: I would try doing a repair on the program.  To do so, go to the control panel and either programs and features or add/remove programs. Then click change or repair.  See if that helps.  If not, uninstall and reinstall.

Customer Issue: Can’t exit POS 9.0. Error messages include “Access violation at address 0078C063 in module ‘qbpos.exe’. Read of address 00000000. Also, “Access violation at address 00De5FC3….read of address 000001D3. Am loathe to shut the machine down.

EMS Response: Access violations in general are resource related and can occur if you seldom reboot the machine as all programs have small memory leaks that decrease resources over time.  I advise my clients to reboot machines at least once a week.

For some unknown reason, POS will lose its database connection. You know this has happened when you try to log in and POS goes into the connection wizard.  There are a couple of things to try.  You can go to control panel in windows and click on Administrative tools.  Double click on services and find the qbpos database manager.  Try stopping and starting it to see if that helps.  Another way I have fixed this problem is to just create a new company file.  After the connection wizard fails a couple of times, you get a change to create a new file.  Name it something very different that your file name.  (Bogus file, bad data, etc)  Then when it creates the connection to POS, you can go to file, company data and open.  It will list your company file.  Choose that and it should open.  In very limited cases, this doesn't work.  If so, you may have a data corruption issue.

I have come to the conclusion that you should never reverse a transaction.  The problem is that when you reverse a sales receipt and/or receiving voucher, it creates reversing transaction on the day that you reversed the transaction even though the original transaction maybe weeks ago.  So what is the harm??  Let's say you create a receiving voucher and then realize the following week that some of the items are the wrong price.  You go back and reverse the voucher, but some of those items have been sold.  POS has the wrong cost for those items and therefore your inventory value as well as Cost of Goods sold are now off. So the proper way to fix this problem is to go back to the original transaction, copy it and then change all of the items to return items.  Change the date to the original date.  Record the transaction.  Then copy the original voucher and put the proper costs in.  Now inventory is correct.  You will need to manually adjust the costs accounts as it will not correct the balance automatically.  To do so find the Cost of Goods entry for the day of the sale and change the amount to match your new adjusted cost.