Quickbooks 2009 non-compatability with earlier versions

Dear nonprofit community of Quickbooks users:

Our nonprofit was so eager to upgrade to Quickbooks 2009 from 2006, that we did not research for forward software compatability. Actually, it never occured to us that a QBs database file in 2009 could not be read in an earlier software version. That's right. Quickbooks 2008 can't read 2009 company files! A call to Inuit verifed this.

This is an issue for our financial due diligence because oversite of the staff of one is done remotely by the volunteer Board Treasurer and he owns a copy of QBs 2008. Intuit has limited orders to one per year so we can't order another license. TechSoup won't switch out our order from 1 user to 3 users, which would solve the dilemma.

Does anyone know of a way to get around this problem of capatability?  

I have an older version of QB, but I have not seen any upgrade, even with the same version, that did not make the data file incompatible with the copies that were not updated.

I don't have any clear solution, but I can outline your options as I see them at this point:

1) Have your volunteer Board Treasurer upgrade to 2009. As an upgrade it shouldn't be too expensive. You could pay for part of the upgrade or perhaps get someone to donate the amount needed. There may be other ways as well for your person to get their copy upgraded.

2) IF you have back up files with the old version, you could remove QB 2009 and reinstall the old version.

3) If you set up remote access with something like PC Anywhere or logmein.com, your volunteer could access the machine with your QB 2009 and work on it that way. This may or may not be a workable situation due to a number of factors, but it is possible.

4) If your volunteer is only reviewing the data, perhaps you can export a reviewer / accountant's copy that they WOULD be able to use on their PC? I don't know about the specifics for this, but it seemed like it might work.

Christian