If a regular employee signs in to QuickBooks Point of Sale and gets Error 121: Permission denied, you do not have permission to select from timeouts, while the Sysadmin account works fine, the problem is almost never the employee's permissions. It points to stale licensing and activity files that Point of Sale keeps on the computer. Clearing them forces the software to rebuild them.

Read this first. Intuit discontinued QuickBooks Desktop Point of Sale 19.0 on October 3, 2023. It says the software can still run without its connected services, but that discontinued products do not receive critical security patches or feature updates. If you are fixing an old install, treat this as a repair to keep you running while you plan a move to a supported system. See Intuit's discontinuation notice.

Before you delete anything

This fix removes the licensing ("Entitlement") files and a small activity file, and Point of Sale then asks you to register again. Because Intuit has retired the services connected to this product, registration may not complete on every version any more, and posts on Intuit's community forum report that activation for POS 19 is no longer available. Treat re-registration as uncertain. So:

  1. Move the files, don't delete them. Cut them into a folder on your desktop, so you can put them back if registration fails.
  2. Make a full backup of your company data first.
  3. Do this on the computer that runs the POS database, and on a client computer only if it shows the same error.

Step 1: Stop everything that is running

  1. Close Point of Sale on every computer.
  2. Open Task Manager and, on the Processes tab, end these processes if they appear: qbpos.exe, QBPOSDBService.exe, QBPOSShell.exe.
  3. Press Windows key + R, type services.msc and press Enter.
  4. Find QBPOS Database Manager vXX (XX is your version number), right-click it and choose Stop.

Step 2: Show hidden files

The folders below are hidden by default. In File Explorer, open the View tab and tick Hidden items. On Windows 7, use Organize, then Folder and Search Options, then the View tab, and select Show hidden files, folders and drives.

Step 3: Clear the Entitlement files

  1. Go to C:\ProgramData\Intuit\Entitlement Client\v8.0.
  2. Press Ctrl + A to select everything in that folder, then move it to your safe folder.

Step 4: Remove the activity file

  1. Go to C:\ProgramData\Intuit\QuickBooks Point of Sale XX.0\Ini, where XX is your version.
  2. Move the file named WSActivity.xml to your safe folder as well.

Step 5: Restart and re-register

  1. Start the QBPOS Database Manager service again in services.msc.
  2. Open Point of Sale. Install any updates it offers, then complete the registration prompts.
  3. Sign in as the employee who saw the error.

If registration fails and Point of Sale will not open, close it, copy the files back from your safe folder, and restart the database service. You are then exactly where you started.

If it still happens

  • Client computers. Repeat steps 3 and 4 on any workstation that shows the error, once the server is working.
  • Other errors on the same machine. See QuickBooks POS won't open your company database and Failed to open company.
  • If none of this holds up, the underlying issue is the age of the software. Intuit's notice describes moving to Shopify, using the free QuickBooks Desktop Connector for products, customers and vendor data, or to a mobile POS app that syncs with QuickBooks Online.

Sources

QuickBooks POSTroubleshootingWindows