I recently logged a call with Quickbooks South Africa (4th of Jan 2012)  with a problem I had getting my Quickbooks 2010 company file to upgrade to Quickbooks 2012.

After being advised to uninstall and reinstall the program and a whole string of other problems they came to the conclusion that they cannot assist me.

Thereafter I contacted the Quickbooks UK offices.  I advised them that I had spoken to the local Quickbooks office and that they could not help me.  They again took me through the same procedures of uninstalling and reinstalling the product.  Still no resolution.  I then waited about a week before they got back to me.  A support representative connected to my computer and redid all the diagnostics steps that had already been tried, including uninstalling .NET etc.  Still no resolution.  He then took a copy of my company file and advised that it could take up to 2 weeks before they got back to me.

Last night I received an e-mail from them:

I am writing to you regarding the QuickBooks Version 2010 Release 4 Company File send for review and received on Jan 17th, 2012.

As I understand it, you are unable to upgrade your QuickBooks version 2010 Company data file to version 2012 as it crashes during the upgrade process.

I have reviewed your file. I am able to upgrade the file to version 2012 if I shorten the business number.

The business number you have entered is 16 characters including numbers, alphabets, special characters and spaces. If you shorten it to 15 characters you should be able to upgrade it to version 2012.

Open the file in Version 2010, Go to the Company Menu and choose Company Information.

On the Company Information window, Click on the Business Number and shorten it by a character. I had removed one of the slash. You may want to remove some other character. But please make sure that the Business Number is not longer than 15 characters including numbers, alphabets, special characters and spaces. Click on OK to Save the Change.

Go back to the Company Menu and go to Company Information to ensure that the change was saved.

You can now upgrade the corrected file to version 2012 and it should upgrade without any issues.

I did as advised and my company file has been successfully upgraded to 2012.

I’m very happy that the problem has been resolved, it’s just horrific that it took a WHOLE MONTH to resolve such a silly problem.  One would think that the programmers would have been able to put some sort of validation in the software to prevent this type of data validation issue.