The best solution for your bloated QuickBooks file.
Condensing the file and starting over both leave you without your detail. Ledger Revival cuts your file at a date you choose and rebuilds everything from that date forward, line by line, in a fresh file. Every list, every item, every transaction, every open order. Everything before the cutover stays exactly as it was in your retired file. That is what makes the new file small, and fast.
The only rebuild service that keeps your history. Every line from your cutover date forward, in a fresh file. Every earlier year, untouched in your original. Not a summary. Not a condense. Not opening balances and a fresh start.
Most recent rebuild: a 25-year-old Enterprise file, now a fraction of its old size. Read the case study.
Condense, start over, switch, or rebuild
Your options
When a QuickBooks Desktop file gets too big to run well, you have four options. Three of them cost you your history, your money, or both. One carries everything you still use into a fresh file.
Option 1
Condense
Never works right.
Fails or stalls again and again on an old file. When it finally finishes, your earlier detail is summarized away, your reports for those years go blank, and the file is rarely much smaller.
Option 2
Start over
Lose everything.
Your history stays behind. Your team re-keys lists and open orders, and goes back to the old file for anything before the start date.
Option 3
Switch to another system
Extremely expensive.
A new platform, a new chart of accounts, every integration rebuilt, a year of your team's time, and your QuickBooks history left behind anyway. The migration alone usually costs more than a rebuild, and the subscription never ends.
The best option
Rebuild it line by line (Ledger Revival)
Keep what you use. Run fast.
The only rebuild service that keeps your history. Every line from your cutover date forward, in a fresh file. Every earlier year, untouched in your original. Not a summary. Not a condense. Not opening balances and a fresh start.
Every invoice, bill, payment and build, line by line
Open orders with their real items and quantities
Inventory by site, with average cost
Custom fields, price levels and templates
Your reports from the cutover date, working on day one
Who it is for
Who a full rebuild is for
Ledger Revival is for a business whose QuickBooks Desktop file has gotten slow or unreliable, and whose team still needs the history inside it.
Reports that take minutes
Reports crawl. Your team waits on the file every day.
A condense that failed
Verify errors. A condense that never finishes.
History you still use
Your team pulls sales and inventory reports that go back years.
Inventory, assemblies and sites
Bills of materials, pending builds, or stock in more than one site.
What comes over
The file your team works in, rebuilt line by line.
Everything your team uses today is in the new file, rebuilt from your cutover date forward.
How the file gets small without losing history
You pick a cutover date. Usually the first day of your last fiscal year, so year-over-year reports work on day one.
We rebuild everything from that date forward in a fresh file: the opening position at the cutover, then every transaction since, line by line.
Everything before the cutover stays in your retired file, read-only and untouched. Nothing is condensed, summarized or deleted. It is one click away when you need it.
Twenty-five years of history is what makes a file slow. Two years of full detail, with the rest preserved where it is, is what makes it fast.
Lists
Customers, vendors, accounts in your display order, classes and terms.
Items and BOMs
Every item, and every assembly with its full bill of materials.
Inventory by site with average cost
Quantities by item and by site, valued month by month.
Every posting transaction
Invoices, bills, payments, builds and journal entries. Every line.
AR and AP by name
Open balances tie by customer and by vendor, document by document.
Open SO, PO and estimates with the real lines
The real items, quantities and rates. Closed lines stay closed.
Custom fields and price levels
Carried with their values on the records that use them.
Form templates
Your invoice, order and estimate layouts, ready to print.
What QuickBooks will not carry, and what we do instead
These limits are QuickBooks' own. They apply to every file and every service. Here is what we do about each one.
Document Center attachmentsStay with the retired file. As an optional add-on, we deliver them as a searchable archive your team opens in a browser and looks up by document number, name or date.
Links between transactionsLinks start fresh in the new file. We close every order your file shows closed and re-apply every payment and credit, so your aging matches.
Users, roles and permissionsYou set them up again at go-live. We hand you the list of current users and roles to work from.
Memorized reportsMoved one report or group at a time with QuickBooks' own export and import, for the reports your team runs.
Audit trail and "last modified by" historyStays in the retired file, which you keep read-only for reference.
Chart of accounts display orderCaptured at the start of the project and restored in the new file.
The full list for your file is in the document we send you before you sign.
Compare
What you get, and what the others leave behind.
A condense replaces your earlier detail with summaries, when it finishes at all. A summary conversion leaves the detail behind in the old file. Eight questions, answered for each option.
Condense or repair service, summary conversion and the Ledger Revival full rebuild, compared
Condense or repairtypically $300–$2,000
Summary conversiontypically $8,000–$15,000
Ledger Revival full rebuildfixed quote, from $9,500
Your history
Error-prone. Fails or stalls again and again on an old file. When it finishes, detail before the date is replaced with summary entries and the file is rarely much smaller. The only way back is the archive copy, which is the old file again.
Left behind in the old file. Only opening balances come over.
Every transaction from your cutover date forward, line by line. Everything earlier stays readable in the retired file.
Open sales orders & POs
Not part of the service.
A dollar total with a placeholder line instead of your items.
The real items, quantities and rates. Closed lines stay closed.
Completed invoices & builds
Summarized into monthly totals before the date. The lines are gone from the working file.
Not migrated.
All of them.
Inventory
Not part of the service.
Opening quantities.
By item and by site, with average cost, month by month.
Custom fields, price levels and templates
Unchanged, but the detail they belonged to is summarized away.
Lists only.
Carried with their values.
Reports from day one
Item and reconciliation reports go blank for the condensed period.
History reports start from the conversion date.
Sales by item, customer and rep, agings and inventory history from your cutover date, working on day one.
Your team during the project
The file goes offline while the service runs.
Re-keying, and trips back to the old file for anything before the start date.
Keeps working in the old file. One weekend to switch.
Proof and warranty
None.
None.
A scorecard at every tier before the final payment, and a 30-day warranty on our work.
The cost of a slow file
Six people losing 20 minutes a day to a slow file: 2 hours a day × $45 an hour × 21 working days = $1,890 a month, about $22,700 a year.
Most of the files we see were costing more than a rebuild every year, long before anyone priced one.
How it works
Six steps. Your team keeps working the whole time.
A rebuild takes four to twelve weeks from signed quote to go-live.
Assessment
$995, credited in full. A findings memo, a fixed quote, a go/no-go.
Rebuild
A fresh file: lists, items, the opening position at your cutover date, then every transaction since, line by line.
Load 1: your review
Your team reviews it in a copy. We fix everything you raise, then you give the go-ahead.
Load 2: catch-up
Everything entered since Load 1, up to one day before. You confirm your approval.
Final load
Thursday or Friday. Every tier reconciled once more.
Cutover
Friday or over the weekend. Your team reconnects payroll, bank feeds and integrations from our checklist and opens the new file Monday morning. The old file stays as your read-only reference. If the final load does not tie for a reason on our side, you keep working in the old file and we load again for the next weekend at no cost.
A written status at every checkpoint, quick replies, calls scheduled around your day, and a 30-day warranty on our work.
Pricing
Start with an assessment. Then a fixed price.
Every rebuild starts with a $995 File Assessment, credited in full, followed by a fixed quote.
Step one
File Assessment
$995credited in full to your rebuild
For every file, before any quote.
Typical timeline: about one week
Done on a copy. Your live file is untouched
A findings memo on your file
Your plan and a fixed quote
The schedule for your file
The document listing what comes over
A clear go or no-go
Full rebuild
Standard
$9,500–$14,000
One location. Service, contracting or distribution.
Typical timeline: 4 to 6 weeks to go-live
Full line-by-line rebuild
Opening balances and AR/AP by name
Every posting transaction
Open orders with the real lines
Three loads with your review in between
30-day warranty
Full rebuild
Inventory & Manufacturing
$14,000–$22,000
Assemblies, or stock in more than one location.
Typical timeline: 6 to 8 weeks to go-live
Full line-by-line rebuild, AR/AP by name
Every posting transaction and open order
Inventory by site with average cost
Assemblies and BOMs
Three loads, your review, 30-day warranty
Full rebuild
Complex Enterprise
$22,000+
Decades of history, deep assemblies, many sites.
Typical timeline: 8 to 12 weeks to go-live
Full line-by-line rebuild, AR/AP by name
Inventory by site, deep assemblies and pending builds
Many sites and integrations
The assessment names anything unusual up front
Three loads, your review, 30-day warranty
Included in every plan
Every list, item, custom field, price level and form template
Every posting transaction, with payments applied to the same documents
AR and AP tied by name at your cutover date
Open sales orders, POs and estimates matched to your file's own open-order reports
The reconciliation scorecard, before the final payment
Three loads, with your team's review and approval
A cutover weekend fully staffed on our side
A 30-day warranty and an itemized audit trail your CPA can review
Fixed quote after the assessment. 50% at signing, 50% once you approve the rebuilt file, before the final load.
Two add-ons worth knowing about
List cleanup
$2,000flat, any plan
Twenty years in one file leaves items nobody sells, customers who never came back, vendors you stopped using and accounts nobody posts to. They slow every pick list and clutter every report. The cleanup retires them before the rebuild, so the new file starts clean.
How we go about it
We date every record by its last activity and flag what has gone quiet.
Your team gets a keep-or-retire list, one per list, with the reason beside each name. You approve it. Nothing is retired on our say-so.
Anything on an open order, inside an active assembly, or tied to history that comes over is kept, no matter how old.
Retired means made inactive, not deleted. Anything can be brought back in seconds.
It runs as the last step of the rebuild, after every tier has reconciled, so the scorecard never changes.
Our bias: keep a few you no longer need before retiring one you still use.
Searchable attachment archive
$2,000up to 2,500 documents · $3,000 to 10,000 · $4,000 to 30,000
QuickBooks will not move attached documents into a new file. We deliver every one of them as a searchable archive your team opens in a browser and looks up by document number, name or date. Years from now, when an auditor or a customer asks for the paperwork behind an old invoice, it is one search away.
What you get
Every attachment, matched to the transaction it was on.
A single page your whole team can open. No login, no software to install.
Priced by document count, so a small file pays a small price.
Extra loads, if you move your go-live date: $750 each.
Before you sign anything, we send you a document that lists exactly what comes over, what QuickBooks itself will not carry into a new file, and what your team does at go-live.
Case study
A 25-year-old Enterprise file, rebuilt in full
We rebuilt a 25-year-old QuickBooks Enterprise file: about 60,000 transactions, 14,000 items and 35 inventory sites. Eight weeks from start to go-live, and $0.00 unexplained variance.
Years in one file
25
Transactions
60,000
Items
14,000
Inventory sites
35
Start to go-live
8 weeks
Unexplained variance
$0.00
The situation
Twenty-five years in one company file, grown to multiple gigabytes. The built-in condense had failed repeatedly, so the file could never be shrunk, and the team lost time to slowdowns every day. The owners had been quoted a summary conversion that would leave every completed invoice and build behind and carry open orders as dollar totals with placeholder lines.
What we did
We cut the file at the start of 2024 and rebuilt everything since: about 60,000 transactions, 14,000 items with their assemblies and bills of materials, 35 inventory sites with average cost, the open sales orders and purchase orders with their real lines, custom fields, price levels and templates. The earlier years stayed in the retired file, read-only. The team kept working in the old file throughout, with catch-up loads before cutover.
The result
Reconciled at every tier with $0.00 unexplained variance. The new file is a fraction of the size of the old one, with two and a half years of history intact and every earlier year still readable in the retired file. About eight weeks from start to go-live, and one weekend to switch.
“Holy shit, this is fast.”
The owner of the file in this case study, first morning on the rebuilt file.
Problems solved in this rebuild
A file this old does not break in one place. These are eight of the hard problems found and solved on the way to $0.00 unexplained variance, each one measured against the retired file rather than assumed.
Problem 1 of 8
Fast again
Waits of a minute or more on searches and simple entries, now none
QuickBooks Desktop does not slow down at random. Every search reads through the whole transaction table, so a lookup in a file with hundreds of thousands of transactions walks all of them. Every name dropdown loads every name on its list before you can type, so tens of thousands of customers and items load for each entry. Every posting updates running balances, and for an inventory item it recomputes the average cost against that item's whole history. Links between documents multiply faster than the documents themselves. None of that is a server problem, and a faster server only hides it for a while. The rebuilt file holds about 85 percent fewer transactions and about 65 percent fewer names, so each of those steps has a fraction of the work to do. In the old file, opening a search could leave the screen loading for a minute or more, the search itself took as long again, and even a basic transaction sat for a while before it saved. The team noticed on the first morning in the rebuilt file. Searches open at once, and entering a simple transaction no longer pauses.
How it was verified. Reported by the people who use the file every day, on the same server and workstations as before. No hardware or network change was made.
About 80 percent smaller, with every open order and every balance intact
The size comes from the cutover. Transactions from the cutover date forward were rebuilt line by line. Everything earlier stays in the retired file, which still opens. The lists were trimmed by the client's own keep list, not by us: a customer, vendor or item with no activity since the cutover, no open document and nothing referring to it was left behind in the retired file. Anything an active assembly used stayed, and when in doubt a record was kept. The result is about 65 percent fewer customer and job records, about 80 percent fewer vendors, about 40 percent fewer items and about 85 percent fewer transactions, in a file about 80 percent smaller. Nothing was deleted anywhere. The retired file is read-only and still holds every record it ever had.
How it was verified. Counts from both files' own Product Information screens and list exports. The retired file is unchanged.
Over $300,000 of open sales orders that every financial check missed
At one stage of the project every financial check passed and the open sales orders still did not match. About 110 orders that were genuinely open in the old file, worth more than $300,000, were missing from the new one, and about 550 orders the old file had already closed still showed as open. None of it touched a dollar, because a sales order does not post. Two traps sat underneath. Roughly two dozen orders carried a closed marker yet still appeared open on the old file's own report, and QuickBooks lets a user close single lines by hand, which only the report honors. The report's default view also leaves some partly invoiced orders off entirely; only the full detail setting shows every one. Each missing order was loaded with its real lines and its open balance matched to the old report, and the stale ones were closed. Open orders are now checked on every catch-up load, not only at the end. The client sees the same open orders, lines and open balances as the retired file shows.
How it was verified. Open sales orders are matched by order number and open balance against the retired file's own open-order report, at its full detail setting, on every load.
About 20,000 units recorded against no site, while every total still tied
In QuickBooks with multiple sites, every receipt, build, sale and transfer names the site the stock moves in or out of. When a transaction names no site, QuickBooks books the movement to a catch-all bucket, and company totals still tie because cost is averaged across all sites. Early loads in this rebuild did exactly that. Thousands of items showed offsetting pairs, short at one site and long by the same amount at another; one department sat about $150,000 short while its sister site sat about the same amount over. Later, about 20,000 units piled up with no site at all, where the old file held none. No financial report showed either. Every affected transaction was put back on its original site, which moved the stock without changing a dollar or an item total. The old file's near-duplicate and placeholder site names, including a site actually named "Blank", were listed for the client to decide on. Warehouse staff see the same quantity on each shelf in the new file as in the old one.
How it was verified. Every item's quantity at every site ties to the retired file, and the no-site bucket holds the same zero the old file holds.
About 3,000 items with the right quantity and the wrong cost, caught before go-live
QuickBooks keeps one running average cost per item: total value divided by quantity on hand. Load the right quantity at the wrong value and every later sale books the wrong cost of goods, and that never corrects itself. After the quantities had been tied item by item, a second check found about 3,000 items where the quantity matched the original and the average cost did not. The reason is mechanical. A quantity correction takes on the new file's own cost at that moment, not the original's. So each correction was redone to carry both the quantity and the original's value in one entry, dated at the month the item first diverged, so every later transaction computed its cost from the right average. A separate group of items had gone negative in the new file. Traced one by one, most were superseded part revisions whose opening stock had been understated, and the opening was corrected rather than the symptom. The items the original file itself carried negative were left to match it.
How it was verified. Each item's quantity on hand and average cost tie to the retired file at the cutover and at go-live, to within a few hundred dollars across 14,000 items, with the four remaining exceptions named for the CPA.
Customer and vendor balances that match the original by name and by aging
The point of carrying history is that the team can keep operating. On the Monday after the switch, collections needs the same open invoices with the same due dates, and payables needs the same open bills, name by name, not just the same control-account totals. So the comparison ran name by name: every customer and every vendor, balance and aging buckets, against the original at the cutover and again at a later month-end. Where the original's own control account and its aging disagreed, as happens in a file with years of direct journal entries, the real names were matched to the original to the penny and the original's own leftover was parked on clearly named accounts for the CPA, so no customer or vendor carried a balance it did not have. Only a handful of names needed correcting, and opening balance equity stayed at zero.
How it was verified. Every customer and vendor balance ties by name and by aging bucket to the retired file at the cutover and at a later month-end, with the few exceptions named.
A years-old gap between the inventory account and the valuation report, traced to four named causes
The old file's inventory asset account sat well away from the value of the items behind it. Nobody could explain it, and it seemed to be getting worse. It was not. Four causes built the gap, all years earlier: summary journal entries QuickBooks wrote when the file was condensed long ago, which moved the ledger but no items; a restatement of the whole balance sheet in one entry; an accountant's year-end reclass after inventory items were pointed at a different cost account; and a habit of editing old inventory transactions, which makes QuickBooks recalculate average cost backward while the ledger entries posted at the time stay put. In some years more than 80 percent of inventory transactions were edited after entry. The apparent growth was items being made inactive, which drops them from the valuation report at every past date too. Counted with inactive items, the gap was flat. The new file carries a smaller gap because it has less edited history, and the difference between the two files is a named, documented figure for the CPA.
How it was verified. With inactive items included, the old file's gap measured the same to the penny at every month-end, and the new file's held within six cents.
About 60,000 attachment folders with no way into the new file, archived as an add-on
The old file's attachments were mostly scanned vendor bills and purchase orders, about 60,000 folders in all. QuickBooks names each folder with an internal number and records the link to its transaction inside the company file, so the attachments cannot be re-attached to a new file, and copying them across does nothing; several routes were tested before saying so. Instead, every folder was matched to its transaction from the old file's full history, and 99.7 percent resolved to a document number, type, date and customer or vendor name. The rest belonged to transactions deleted long ago and were kept in a clearly labeled folder. Each folder was copied under a readable name, such as the bill number, vendor and date, with a single search page at the top: search by document number, name or file name, filter by type, and the document opens in the browser. The original attachment folder was left untouched, so the retired file still opens its own attachments, and the copy is the first backup those documents ever had. The archive is priced separately from the rebuild.
How it was verified. 99.7 percent of attachment folders resolved to a named transaction in the retired file, and every copied folder's file count matches its original.
Can a QuickBooks Desktop file be rebuilt without losing history?
Yes. You choose a cutover date. We rebuild everything from that date forward, line by line, in a fresh file, every transaction and every open order included, and your original file keeps every earlier year exactly as it is. Each tier is reconciled to the penny against your current file, and you see that scorecard before the final payment.
What does Condense remove from a QuickBooks Desktop file?
Condense is meant to do what a rebuild does: pick a date, keep full detail after it and summarize everything before it. It works inside your existing file. Transactions before the date are replaced with monthly summary entries, so old invoices, bills and builds lose their lines and item and reconciliation reports go blank for that period. The original detail survives only in the archive copy Condense makes, which is the old file again. On a large, old file the process is error-prone and fails or stalls again and again. Even when it completes, the file is rarely much smaller, because anything open, unreconciled or tied to inventory stays, and you are still working in the same aging database.
Every rebuild starts with a $995 File Assessment, credited in full. The fixed quote then lands in one of three plans: Standard ($9,500 to $14,000), Inventory & Manufacturing ($14,000 to $22,000) or Complex Enterprise ($22,000 and up). Payment is 50% at signing and 50% once you approve the rebuilt file. The list cleanup is a $2,000 add-on on any plan.
How long does a QuickBooks Desktop rebuild take?
Four to twelve weeks from signed quote to go-live, depending on the plan. The assessment sets the schedule for your file.
Does my team stop working during the project?
No. Your team keeps working in the old file the whole time. The switch to the rebuilt file happens over one weekend.
What does our team need to do?
Review the rebuilt file in a copy after Load 1 and tell us everything you see. We fix everything you raise. Your team is responsible for reviewing it fully before cutover. Once you approve the rebuilt file (an email is fine), we run the final load.
What is the difference between a rebuild and a summary conversion?
A summary conversion brings over lists and opening balances, and your history stays in the old file. A rebuild carries every transaction line by line, and open orders keep their real items, quantities and rates.
How do I know the rebuilt file matches my original?
You get a reconciliation scorecard before the final payment. It compares your file and the rebuild at eight tiers, including the trial balance at every month-end, inventory by item and site, and open orders. Each tier shows $0.00 or a named exception that you approve.
What does not transfer to a new QuickBooks company file?
QuickBooks will not carry Document Center attachments, links between transactions, users and permissions, or the audit trail into a new file. Attachments stay with the retired file, or come over as a searchable archive through an optional add-on. We rebuild payment applications so your aging matches. The full list is in the document we send before you sign.
Because it only carries what you still use. You choose a cutover date, usually the first day of your last fiscal year. We rebuild every transaction from that date forward in a fresh file, and everything before it stays in your retired file. A file holding two years of full detail is a fraction of the size of one holding twenty, and it runs like it.
What happens to transactions before the cutover date?
They stay in your retired file, exactly as they are today. Nothing is condensed or deleted. You keep that file read-only, and your team opens it when a question reaches back further than the cutover. Your reports in the new file run from the cutover date forward.
Over the years a file collects items nobody sells, customers who never came back, vendors you stopped using and accounts nobody posts to. The cleanup dates every record by its last activity and gives your team a keep-or-retire list to approve. Anything on an open order, in an active assembly, or tied to history that comes over is kept. Retired records are made inactive, not deleted, so any of them can come back. It runs after the rebuild has reconciled. It is a $2,000 add-on on any plan.
What if something goes wrong on the switch weekend?
Your old file is never changed before you switch. If the final load does not tie for a reason on our side, your team keeps working in the old file on Monday and we load again for the next weekend at no additional cost. You approve the rebuilt file before the second half of the fee is due.
What about payroll, bank feeds and integrations?
They connect to a company file, so they are reconnected to the new file at cutover. Paychecks, deposits and integration transactions from your cutover date forward come over like every other transaction. Setting the payroll service, bank feeds and integrations up again on the new file is done by your team or your vendor, and we give you a checklist of what to reconnect.
What happens to attachments?
They stay with the retired file, which you keep. As an optional add-on, priced by document count, we put every attached document into a searchable archive your team can open any time. The documents do not reattach to transactions in the new file.
Six people losing 20 minutes a day to a slow file costs about $22,700 a year. A fresh start adds its own cost: re-keying lists and open orders, and reports that stop at the start date, so every year-over-year question sends someone back to the old file.
Do you touch our live file?
Never before go-live. After go-live, only with your approval and outside your business hours.
What if something is wrong after go-live?
For 30 days after cutover, anything we did not get right we fix at no charge. Anything your team missed or did not raise during the review is handled as a change order.
Which QuickBooks Desktop editions do you rebuild?
We rebuild QuickBooks Desktop Pro, Premier, Accountant and Enterprise files. The rebuilt file stays in QuickBooks Desktop.
About
About Ledger Revival
Ledger Revival LLC is an Illinois company that rebuilds QuickBooks Desktop company files, line by line, for businesses across the United States.
What we do
Line-by-line rebuilds of QuickBooks Desktop company files, reconciled to the penny. The new file stays in QuickBooks Desktop.
Who we work with
Businesses whose QuickBooks Desktop file has gotten too slow or too unreliable to run on.
Where
Remote, anywhere in the United States. We work from backups and restored copies of your file.
How to start
Send the intake form below or email hello@ledgerrevival.com. The first paid step is the $995 File Assessment, credited in full.
Start here
Tell us about your file.
A few facts about your file. They tell us which plan it fits and what the assessment should look at. Ten minutes, and approximate is fine.