Setting up the Financial Statement Designer in a network enviroment.

Legacy KB ID: 364

Question

Why do I need to take special care using Financial Statement Designer?

Answer

Financial Statement Designer (FSD)

can only be run if QuickBooks is in Single-User Mode and in a single-user configuration.

Overview

The steps below describe how to get QuickBooks Financial Statement Designer (FSD) reports on a network so that everyone in an organization can have access to view and make changes to them.

Before You Make Changes

All of the customer's financial statements and supporting document templates are stored in an .FSR file. Make sure that all computers that are going to access the FSD reports have Read/Write access over the folder where you will be storing the .fsr file on the network.

Warning:

Attempting to connect to .fsr file on a network path where the user does not have sufficient permissions will crash QuickBooks and FSD will stop functioning temporarily.

Detailed Instructions

A. Move the FSD reports to a network folder so that everyone can access them:

1. To find this file location from the computer where FSD is set up, open FSD on the computer where the financial reports were created.

2. Select the FSD Edit menu and select Preferences. This should give you the .fsr file path. You can either just share out that folder on that computer to everyone else on the network, or move the FSD file to a folder on another computer everyone already has Read/Write access on.

3. To move the file to a shared location on another computer, select the Edit menu and Preferences, and then click Browse to select the location where you would like to move the file.

4. Click OK.

B. Connect the other computers to the .fsr file:

1. Open QuickBooks and FSD from one of the other computers on the network.

2. If FSD has never been used on this computer, it should prompt you to either Create a new Financial Statement Designer client or Reconnect to an existing Financial Statement Designer client.

3. Click Reconnect (etc.), and click OK.

4. Browse to the shared location of the .fsr file and click OK.

5. Everything should connect if you have sufficient permissions to the folder.

6. If you did not get the prompt with the two options, and instead FSD just opened to a database of reports, then you have already used FSD on that computer.

C. If multiple computers have already created their own FSD database:

• If multiple computers have already created their own FSD reports, they will need to manually disconnect from their current database before connecting to another.

• You will need to decide which FSD database you would like to use.

• It is not practical to have multiple FSD files with different reports in them, because of the difficulty in switching from one to another. If you need to combine reports from multiple files before continuing, export from one FSD file and import into another.

D. Once you have just one database with all their reports in it on the network, disconnect the other computers from their old FSD file and connect them to the new one:

• In order to disconnect from a FSD database, the .fsr file needs to be moved, renamed, or deleted so that the FSD can no longer find it. Browse to the location where the customers’ .fsr file is located and rename, delete, or move it to another folder.

• The next time the computer attempts to open FSD, you should get the prompt to Reconnect to an Existing Financial Statement Designer Client. Choose this option and browse to the network location where the .fsr file is shared and click OK. This should connect the computer to the database.

E. Fixing Errors you may receive because of sharing violations across the network:

• Attempting to connect to an .fsr file that is in a folder that your computer does not have sufficient Read/Write permissions to will possibly cause QuickBooks to crash with several errors and FSD may become unusable.

• Many times this error will leave the qbfsd.exe process running because it was incorrectly shut down. Trying to open FSD again will give an error.

• A reboot will fix this problem and so will manually end the qbfsd.exe process running in Task Manger.

 

How did we do?

Related Articles

Powered by HelpDocs (opens in a new tab)

Powered by HelpDocs (opens in a new tab)