What happens to our attached documents if we start a new file?

What is actually happening

A Doc Center attachment is two things. The document itself is an ordinary file in a folder named Attach, beside your company file. The record of which document belongs to which transaction lives inside the company file.

QuickBooks offers no way to rebuild that record in another company file. Copying the Attach folder across does not do it: the documents land on the disk, and the new file does not see them. This is QuickBooks' own limitation. It applies to a file started over by hand, to a summary conversion, and to a rebuild like ours. We tested it ourselves rather than take it on faith.

The folder is not much help on its own either. Inside Attach, documents sit under folder names that are internal codes, not invoice numbers or vendor names. Someone looking for last March's bill from a supplier cannot browse to it. They would have to open folders one at a time until they found it.

On an older file the volume can be large: tens of thousands of documents, much of it paperwork from vendors, attached to bills and purchase orders over many years.

What people try first, and what it costs them

Copying the Attach folder into the new file's folder is the first thing most people try. The files are there and nothing points to them.

Re-attaching by hand works, one transaction at a time: open it, attach the document, save. At one minute each, 10,000 documents is over 160 hours of someone's time, and most businesses stop well short of that.

Keeping the old file for lookups does work. The retired file still shows every attachment on its own transaction, as long as the Attach folder stays beside it unchanged. The cost is that every question about an old document means opening the old file, and someone has to keep a version of QuickBooks that can open it.

Condense is not an answer here. It works inside the same aging file, and on an old file it fails or stalls again and again.

A summary conversion or a move to another platform leaves the documents behind unless someone handles them separately, and on another platform, what can be brought in depends on that platform's own import.

What a line-by-line rebuild does instead

Because the new file cannot hold the attachments the old way, the rebuild treats them as their own deliverable, an optional add-on. The documents never leave your network. They are copied into a new folder on your own share, one folder per transaction, named the way a person would look for it: the transaction type, its number, the customer or vendor, and the date. Every attachment is matched to the transaction it was on in your file.

At the top of that folder sits a single page that opens in a current browser. Your team searches by document number, customer or vendor name, or date, narrows by transaction type, and clicks straight into the document. There is no login and nothing to install. Documents whose transaction was deleted years ago are kept in a folder of their own, not thrown away.

The original Attach folder stays exactly as it is, beside the retired file, so the old file still shows every attachment on its own transaction. The new copy is also a second copy of every document.

The archive is priced by document count: $2,000 up to 2,500 documents, $3,000 up to 10,000, $4,000 up to 30,000, and quoted above that. The documents do not reattach to transactions in the new file. They stay one search away.