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J
jcit
December 8, 2020
Question

How long should it take to mark 20 products as inactive? To me the length of time this process takes for even 5 products is far too long (40 seconds as last count).

  • December 8, 2020
  • 2 replies
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Original commenter did not share additional details

2 replies

R
Ryan_M
December 8, 2020

Hi @jcit,

 

You have the option to mark several products and services as inactive in QuickBooks Online (QBO).

 

Let's go through the steps:

 

  1. Highlight the Sales tab.
  2. Select Products and Services.
  3. Tick each product and/or service you wish to mark as inactive. 
  4. Click the Batch actions drop-down menu.
  5. Choose Make inactive.

On the other hand, if you need to upload several products and services, take a look at this article: Import products and services from Excel. Scroll down the page and look for the Import products and services with sub-categories and sub-items section to learn how to upload products already with categories and sub-categories on them. 

 

Do you have other questions about the Products and Services page of QBO? Post them below, and I'll take care of it as soon as I can. 

J
jcitAuthor
December 9, 2020

Hi Ryan,

 

Thanks for your reply. I know how to batch process items as inactive, but I need to know why it takes so long for even a handful of items to be processed.

G
GeorgiaC
December 10, 2020

Hi jcit, 

 

Thanks for getting back to us on this thread, I appreciate your frustrations as this sounds like a time-consuming task, though you may have hit the nail on the head there with the number of products that you have. While there's no hard limit on the amount of data you can have within QuickBooks, a large amount of this will impact performance. Generally, batch marking products as inactive would take around1-2 seconds.  

 

We've got a guide here which you can refer to to troubleshoot performance issues to try and speed the process up, and it may also be worth downloading the desktop app to see if this runs faster for you. 

 

Thanks 🙂

J
jcitAuthor
December 10, 2020

All PCs exceed the minimum requirements.

Internet speed is 60Gb+.

We use the latest version of Chrome, and we don't run in Incognito mode unless troubleshooting.

We tried the desktop app, but if anything it was slower.

 

So, I can see that this could be down to the number of products. Sadly, when we signed up for QBO there was no mention of workable/safe limits for a reasonable speed of working. Not hard limits, just a point where things may start to slow down. This is compounded by the fact that there's no easy/efficient way (e.g. with a third-party app) to modify the product database (without incurring significant additional costs).

 

Looks like it's either going to be 10s of hours marking a few at a time (not easy considering the size of our team and workloads) or moving to a different system (not ideal considering the time and money we've already put into getting up and running with the QBO system).

 

E
EmmaM
December 10, 2020

We will pass on your feedback Jdt, we do take on board it was not stressed to you that a large number of products could slow things down. We don't want you to move software at all, we do not have an alternative way to make them inactive but in smaller batches.😊

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