Review: Keyword Search for QuickBooks

You have a lot of important business information in your QuickBooks company file, and it is very important that you have the ability to search through this information quickly. Today I’m going to talk about a free plug-in product that may be able to help you.

Many of you are familiar with the Find option that you have in various windows in QuickBooks. You can, for example, search for an invoice with certain characteristics:

You can search further through QuickBooks with the advanced search:

These searches are limited in their ability, and aren’t terribly fast. I often can’t find what I need with these.

In 2007 QuickBooks added an option to add Google Desktop Search to QuickBooks, which adds quite a bit of power. Many people already use Google Desktop Search, and Intuit has created a special version that extends the search capability to your QuickBooks company file. It is reasonably secure, in that you can only search for information in your company file if you are actually logged in to the company. You can locate this in the Edit menu:

I was excited when this was first released, but quite frankly, I ended up turning it off. Note the warning you get when you enable it:

Oh boy, just what I need, something to slow down performance on my computer. Anyone using QuickBooks knows that performance issues are a major concern with QuickBooks. The warning is accurate – I noticed that my system ran slower with this product enabled. I will admit that I didn’t stick with it for a long time, and it might have been less of a problem later, but I just couldn’t accept the slowdown (I tend to be a very impatient person).

There is, however, a solution to this that I’m happy with (although with some qualifications) – Keyword Search for QuickBooks from Intuit Labs.

Intuit Labs

You might not have heard of Intuit Labs before. This is a group of people who work for Intuit, who play with new technologies and try out different things that may enhance QuickBooks, TurboTax, Quicken and QuickBase. If you go to their web site you will find an eclectic collection of applications that provide a number of helpful functions. Note that these are, generally, beta test products. That means that they don’t come with any guarantee, they can’t promise that the apps will work, and in fact they could mess up your data. You are on your own if you use them. You will see (if you read it) a standard Intuit beta test site agreement that absolves them from any blame and says that they won’t promise that you can continue to use the product in the future. So far, however, I’ve been very happy with the few applications that I’ve taken the time to use.

Keyword Search for QuickBooks

If you are using a relatively recent copy of QuickBooks you can download the Keyword Search (http://intuitlabs.com/apps/keyword-search-for-quickbooks) and install it on your system. The process is simple. However, I can only recommend this if you are running Windows XP. I have not been able to get this to properly work on Windows Vista at the time I’m writing this, although that could have something to do with the way my system is set up. 10/28/2008 Update: I was able to get this to work with Vista and QuickBooks 2009 with some tweeks to Internet Explorer.

Note that their web page says that you don’t need this if you have QuickBooks 2007 or later, because of the Google Desktop feature I mention above. However, I’ve found that by using just this application I’m not seeing the big performance hit that I saw with Google Desktop Search.

Download the program to your computer and run the installation application. It is small and runs fairly quickly. After it is installed, and you restart QuickBooks, you will see the Innovation Add-ins menu on the right of your QuickBooks menu bar, and find Keyword Search on that menu.

Selecting this, you see a Search window as follows. Note that the first time you run this the program must build indexes of your data, and this may take some time. It will do it with the first search you do. After things are indexed the search is very fast.

Clicking on the Setup button allows you to select which types of records the program will search:

The Search Method dropdown list gives you several options for performing the search. I usually use the This exact phrase option. If you use an option like All keywords and search for a company name like “Best Buy”, the search will find any record that has both “Best” and “Buy” in it, which might not be what you want. An Exact phrase search would find just those records for “Best Buy”.

Here is an example of a search for Test Customer. You can see that it found all of the invoices for the customer, as well as to jobs for the customer. Also all purchase orders and sales orders.

By clicking on the Ref link you are taken to that transaction. For instance, here is the purchase order it referenced, note that Test Customer is the customer that the part was assigned to:

You can use the Print button in the search window to print a listing of your results.

I LIKE IT! This has proven to be very helpful, and it doesn’t slow down my system like the Google Desktop application (as far as I can tell). As I said, I can’t get it to work on Windows Vista yet, but I’ll continue to work on that.  10/28/2008 update: If you are using Windows Vista, ready the comments from Matt from the Intuit Labs below, as you may need to tweak some settings in IE.

Have any of you tried this? Let us know what you think!