Quickbooks crashes on reconcile reports or saving as PDF

Do you know the saying about builder’s houses? It refers to tradies that are so busy repairing other people’s places that their own home has a few things that need attention, but they never make the time to fix. IT people have the same issue with their own computers. I’d been putting up with a problem in Quickbooks Pro 2012-2013 for some time and finally decided to research it.

When my bookkeeper reconciled the accounts & wanted to print the reports, Quickbooks would hang. Same symptom if I tried to save an invoice as a PDF (using the inbuilt QB feature, not a third party PDF printer). My computer is running Windows 7 64-bit.

Your errors may include:

  • Could not print to printer. Check your printer selection. Printing may have been cancelled from another program’
  • QuickBooks PDF Converter Activation Error -20: You cannot print directly to the QuickBooks PDF Converter. Try using QuickBooks Save as PDF menu option or Activation error. Printer not activated. Error code -20.
  • The device is not ready.
  • QuickBooks could not save your form as a PDF file.
  • Unable to save as PDF.
  • Other .PDF file-related errors may occur when you email transactions.
  • QuickBooks stops responding when you try to reconcile accounts.

I knew if I went into the queue for the Quickbooks V303 PDF Converter, I’d see the document sitting in an Error state. If I deleted it from the queue, Quickbooks would become responsive again and carry on.

The fix is actually pretty straightforward. It involves creating a new local port for the printer, rebooting, and setting the Run As Administrator & Compatability options for the program. If that sounds like German, here are the detailed instructions from Reckon: http://www.quicken.com.au/kb/issue_view.asp?ID=3577

Just completeing Stage 1 did the trick for me. Finally. I should have fixed it months ago!

-SCuffy

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