Submitted by Will on October 01, 2014

As you know, Will is a member of a QuickBooks forum where member’s posts issues and questions. The colleagues provide information and solutions to help the consultant properly support their client. They explore and share ideas and advice.

Question from a colleague to the group: Client has spun off another wholesale company and would like to keep it completely separate from their existing retail store. Are there any problems with creating another company file in POS and having it synchronize with another QB Financial database?

Colleague: QuickBooks Point of Sale (POS) works a little differently than QuickBooks Financial Desktop (QBF). The POS database cannot be renamed like the Desktop *.qbw files. They are all called qbpos.db so the way they are differentiated is that each database is created and put into folders using your Company Name using the default installation directory. So the [company one] folder will contain its qbpos.db file and [company two] folder will contain its qbpos.db file. You can switch back and forth within the software.

Will's reply: The other thing to consider is whether you have more than one workstation connecting to the POS file. If you do, all of the workstations need to be in the same file. For example, if I have 2 workstations, POS will not let me change to the other company unless all of the workstations are logged out and then once I change companies, the client workstations will have to scan the network and reconnect, therefore I really don't recommend it in a multi-user setting. What we can help with is to keep the wholesale inventory in QBF and have them manage it there, unless there is a walk up retail component to that business.