If you want to test QuickBooks' inventory feature or try a new workflow without risking your live data, you need a sandbox with a real copy of your file. Brittany Brown shows the process: upgrade to QuickBooks Advanced, run a full backup, add your sandbox company to the backup area, then copy the backup into it. The upgrade is temporary, since the whole thing takes about an hour.
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QuickBooks Online Tutorial | How to Set Up a QBO Sandbox with Your Existing Data
3 min
Transcript
0:00 Why create a sandbox
The purpose of this video is to talk you through the process of how to create a copy of your QuickBooks Online file for a sandbox.
Now there's a lot of reasons why people may want to create a sandbox. They may be wanting to play with the inventory feature and they don't want to mess anything up. Or they may want to be experimenting with other workflows without messing other data up. So this is a great way to create that copy, play with it, without having to mess up your original data file.
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0:29 Upgrading to QuickBooks Advanced
First of all, you have to be in QuickBooks Advanced in order to be able to do this. So to check that, you're going to click on this gear icon, come over here to accounts and settings, click on here where it says billing and subscription.
Now you can upgrade to do this process, and then you can turn around and downgrade also. So even though QuickBooks Advanced is more expensive, hopefully you're going to be done with this process within about an hour, and so you won't have to leave it upgraded. So upgrade it and then downgrade it.
1:03 Running a full backup
After you're upgraded into QuickBooks Advanced, you will then have this new option available that wasn't there before. And this option is to back up your company. So you're going to click on backup company. This is the screen that you'll get.
You may need to add a company if it's not already added to this, but assuming it's already here, you're going to click on action, you're going to say run full backup. And then you'll wait for this to be finished. It'll tell you the finished at time. You're going to wait for it to basically tell you that it's finished.
While it's backing up, it'll show you the status bar of how much has been backed up and what it's been working on backing up. You'll just wait until this status bar says 100.
1:44 Copying the backup into your sandbox
After your backup is fully completed you'll have a couple of different options. In this case I'm going to show you how to create a sandbox, so to create a copy into a different instance of QuickBooks.
So back in here in my portal, in my backup restore, I'm going to add a company. And this is a company that I previously created as sort of a sandbox. In fact it's even called new sandbox. I'm going to add it now into my list of resources here in my backup area. So I'm going to say new sandbox, and I'm going to allow for this new sandbox to be part of my backup area.
Now for this backup that I just created, I'm going to come here, I'm going to say actions, I'm going to say copy. I'm going to copy from the client that I just backed up to create the sandbox, create the date that I want to back up as of, create the hour and time that I want to back up as of, and then I'm going to copy it to my new sandbox that I just created. And I'm going to click create copy.
Now this will trigger the process of creating a new sandbox for me to work with, with all the same data that was there for my client previously.