1.5 hours to begin is very high to me, 6 is out right wrong.

1. Is this a CS, work-group , standalone environment? How many users & PCs
2. How is the "server" ? Dedicated? , CPU - RAM - OS - running added services - hard drive setup (RAID? )
3. Are you running the "company close" at the server? If not, you should.other wise your "wire" bound by your network speed (slow)

If your Admin won't let you touch the server, ask him/her to run the close when your done with reports & backup and then show the time saving to those to "pay" and justify the access by showing the payroll saving each month.

4. Does the server have enough HD space free?


I close 4 companies, 2 of which have hundreds of GL, AR, OE AP IV transactions per company with 36 month histories in 45 minutes. The server is a 2009 dual Xeon 16MB / RAID 6 / six SAS 15,000RPM hard drives, so its is not a new state of the art.
Our backup from within BW take 6 minutes per company for a reference to size (1.04GB & 960MB).


I'm currently planning a "state of the art"** server with SSD drives and plan to cut the time to 15 minutes or less.



** State of the Art used to own BW back in the day, before Sage

JoeGCOACGMA-
In addition to what Vince suggested below, I would also focus on what may have changed in your environment? Whenever there has been a change in performance you want to look at your environment. I would also try closing directly on the server to take the network out of it. Does that improve your performance? I have enclosed some articles for you to review on performance tuning and making sure you are at least using the minimum requirements. Please see articles #17621 How to troubleshoot slow performance and #45396 System Requirements: Sage BusinessWorks Accounting current version .
Thanks,
Coleen