QuickBooks and Software Firewalls

I'll admit that I don't do much when it comes to tech support for small businesses, but I recently came across having to get a shared setup of Intuit Quickbooks 2010 working between two Windows 7 machines in a HomeGroup, using Trend Micro Internet Security 2010 protection for a small company.

First off, if you are using a third-party product for anti-virus/security/firewall, make sure to disable the Windows firewall. I expected Windows 7 to recognize that a firewall product was installed, but it didn't, thus the OS firewall was conflicting with the settings from the Trend Micro.

Once that hurdle had been crossed, it was time to configure the Trend Micro firewall to let QuickBooks through. I started out creating an exception for the main executiable application, but that didn't do the trick. A little research brought me to this knowledge base article from Intuit that lists out over a dozen file exceptions that need to be made. It was a little tedious to set up, but the multi-user mode of the application worked as expected once they were added.

Much safer than the work around the staff was using before - disabling the firewall whenever they wanted to work on the company finances!