Are you trying to link several computers ACT! and Quickbooks data? Then read on…
If you are a small business then you know how important it is to manage contacts so that you never lose a potential customer. One of the top programs on the market for this is “ACT!” contact manager. ACT! keeps a record of calls, emails, and chats you have with customers so that if you (or another sales rep) need to get in touch they - it will be easy to know where the customer stands. You can record everything in ACT so that anyone in your company can pick up the contact case like an old friend.
Now if you sell anything (and I hope so) you probably also use Quickbooks or PeachTree to handle the business side of things. With Quickbooks 2006/2007/2008 you can create a single company file on one computer - and set that computer to be a “server” of the file for anyone else on the network to access. This way only one database is needed and any changes that are made are kept in one place for everyone to see. This is great for 2-2,000 PC’s because you only need one “server” to give anyone access that needs it.
What if you need information on a proposal you did in quickbooks while you are calling a customer? Well, you would have to open up quickbooks and find the proposal information. What if you are out on a trip and you need this information but all you have is your ACT! program on your laptop (quickbooks isn’t cheep). Well, there is nothing you can do but call work first and ask for the data. What is even worse is that you have to enter data back and forth from ACT to Quickbooks to keep the contacts and data synchronized.
Well this is where the “ACT! Link 3.2 or 3.2.1” (for quickbooks) comes in. ACT! Link v3.2.x supports ACT! 2007/208 and Quickbooks 2006/2007/2008. (Standard, Pro and Premiere versions of the programs.)
Getting ACT! Link to Actually Work
This guide is for those of you who have discovered that, although ACT made the “link”, they don’t understand how to get it to work with Quickbooks. The following post describes our businesses struggles to get hundreds thousands of dollars of software to work (despite ACT! and Quickbooks best efforts to stop us). My hope is that this will save hundreds of hours of work for others.
On a personal note: I have never dealt with companies that knew so little about the software they sold. At least Microsoft’s answer to “reboot” works sometimes…
Here is our network setup:
- 4 Computers running Windows XP flavors
- 1 of the computers is the “server” that shares the Quickbooks file.
- 3 of the computers connect to the file on the “sever” (which is just a plain PC).
- Norton 2007 is installed on each PC and actually didn’t cause any of the problems we had.
- 3 of the PC’s have ACT! 2008 installed (the “server” PC didn’t need it).
- All 4 of the PC’s have Quickbooks 2006 Pro installed on them.
This article requires that each of your PC’s meet the following requirements:
- ACT! 2007 or 2008
- ACT! Link v3.2.x
- Quickbooks 2005/2006/2007 PRO
- Windows XP/Media Center (I don’t know about Vista or XP home but they should work)
Rule #1: don’t trust tech support
Only the developers know how ACT! works - and they don’t share information with the Tech support team. This means that if you call them you will get many different answers about what works and how depending on the current time, weather, and NFL score. Simply put, take everything with a grain of salt. Following are some of the things I was told:
You must install ACT! on the “server” in order to let other PC’s access the Quickbooks file on the “server” (wrong) ACT! link doesn’t work with Quickbooks 2006 (wrong) You must upgrade from Quickbooks 2006 to 2008 (wrong) ACT! link v3.2 actually works (Install
Install Quickbooks and ACT then install ACT! Link v3.2.1 (or later) which you can download from the act.com website. Version v3.2.0 will not work. After they are installed you have to run Quickbooks from one of the PC’s that has ACT! and the ACT! link installed. You can open the file in Quickbooks from ANY computer that has ACT! installed - it doesn’t matter which one you use. With Quickbooks open, select the company file ACT! 2007/2008 will pull from and MAKE SURE YOU LOGIN as the ADMIN. I logged in as an admin and not the admin that is what caused so much trouble.
After you have opened the file as the admin you should now open ACT! 2008. Durring loading, ACT! should pop-up a box asking you for your Quickbooks company. (both should be open at this point) Select the company and then you will need to switch to the Quickbooks program to approve the request that pops up in Quickbooks asking you if you want to allow ACT! access to the data. If the box doesn’t pop-up when you first load ACT! then click on “tools” -> “Quickbooks” and it will pull up the inport from Quickbooks screen as above.
Remember kids, an admin account really isn’t an admin account - it’s merely an admin account. So don’t let it confuse you!
After you approve ACT! to have access to Quickbooks you are pretty much done. You now need to go to each computer with ACT! and Quickbooks (minus the “server” unless you need it too) and open Quickbooks as any user (you don’t need to be admin any more) then ACT! and select the database and import the contacts. You won’t get any more pop-ups asking if ACT! can access the data because you only need to do that once.
The biggest problem to all of this was the fact that unless you login as THE ADMIN (and not AN ADMIN) at least once, Quickbooks will not pop-up a message asking you if you want to allow ACT! to use the data. It was a simple problem but one that was not documented anywhere (even google). If not for the constant confusion from people at ACT! I would have given up - but the fact that they said different things kept me hoping.
