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Zeno learns as you work: coding rules, notes about a client’s books, playbooks, and a record of everything it has posted. By default all of that lives on the workstation that learned it, so a second bookkeeper starts from nothing and never sees what the first one already worked out. Point every workstation at one folder on your server and they share it.
Run the installer with the same -DataDirectory on each PC. That is the whole setup.
Working from a shared folder is included with the Practice licence — see Core, Practice and Enterprise. Reading one is never gated: on any licence, and with no licence at all, a workstation pointed at the share can open the console, read every run, plan, rule and note on it, and reverse a run. What Practice covers is writing through it.A workstation that is meant to work on its own points -DataDirectory back at its own PC and is unaffected.

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What becomes shared

Duplicate detection is the one worth pausing on. Zeno fingerprints everything it posts, and a shared journal means those fingerprints span the office — so a bill Ann entered on Tuesday comes back as already posted when Bob’s batch includes it on Thursday, on a different PC. Only one workstation needs to sync a client’s local copy. Everyone queries what it built.

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Use the server’s own name, not a drive letter

Pass \\fileserver\QuickBooks\Zeno, not Q:\Zeno.
A mapped drive letter means something different on each PC, and nothing at all on one whose login script has not run yet. Register a client through Q: on one desk and \\fileserver on the next, and Zeno treats them as two different clients — two local copies, two sets of coding rules, and a practice-wide total that counts that client twice. The same applies when you register a company file. Use the full \\server\share path. qb_doctor checks this and names any registration still keyed by a drive letter. The fix is qb_forget_company then register again with the full path; nothing you have posted is affected, because the history is keyed by company name rather than by path.

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Setting up the folder

  • Put it on the same server as the company files.
  • Give every bookkeeper read and write access to it.
  • Exclude it from on-access virus scanning, the same advice Intuit gives for the .QBW file itself.
  • Register each client once, from one workstation. The others pick it up.

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Who did what

Everything anyone records is stamped with their Windows account and the machine they were sitting at — ann@RECEPTION-PC. That is what tells two bookkeepers apart in a history they both write to. If you would rather see real names, set Operator in appsettings.json, or the QBMCP_Operator environment variable, on each workstation. The review console fills in the reviewer’s name for you rather than asking. If someone changes a decision a colleague already made on the same batch, the console says whose decision it replaced instead of quietly overwriting it.

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Two people, one batch

QuickBooks Desktop still works on one company file at a time, and Zeno still posts only to the file that workstation has visibly open. What a shared journal adds is arbitration between desks:
  • A batch is posted once. A run claims the plan before anything reaches QuickBooks. If Bob applies a batch Ann is already applying, he is told which run has it and nothing is sent. A run that fails before posting anything hands the plan back.
  • A client’s local copy is synced by one workstation at a time. A second sync is refused, naming who started the first and when. If that workstation crashes, the lease frees itself after fifteen minutes.

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What each workstation still needs

QuickBooks Desktop must be installed on every PC that uses Zeno — the connection is in-process, not a network API, so there is no way to reach a copy of QuickBooks on the server. See which connection. Each bookkeeper opens their own console at 127.0.0.1:8082 with their own password. It reads the shared journal, so everyone sees the whole team’s work, but the console itself is never exposed on the network. Licences are per workstation. A key can name several machines; qb_doctor prints this machine’s id if you need a seat moved to it.

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Moving an existing install onto a share

Nothing migrates automatically, and there is no merge. Pick the workstation whose history you want to keep, copy its %LOCALAPPDATA%\Zeno\qb-mcp folder to the share, then reinstall each workstation with -DataDirectory pointing there. Upgrade the workstations together. A journal written by a newer version of Zeno refuses to open in an older one rather than half-reading it, so a PC left behind will say so plainly and ask to be updated.