Deleting Customer Accounts (cards) - Are there any problems?

[mbogdanoff]

Our company has never taken the time to delete inactive customer accounts (and we have a lot). I definitely know the proceedure to delete the customers, I found that info in another thread and in the Help menu in Great Plains. However, are there any issues with deleting the associated transactions with the inactive customers? Will deleting the transactions in history cause any issues with accounts not balancing, etc? (Obviously, we're only going to do those customers with nothing current.) Has anyone had experience with this and can advise?

Thanks so much,

Michael

 

[VictoriaYudin]

I always cringe when anyone suggests deleting transactional data. I have written so many reports that rely on all historical data being there that my gut reaction is to tell you to not do it unless you absolutely, positively are 1000% percent sure you will never need it and on top of it that you have backups of all the detail that will be deleted that the users can access if needed.

My inclination, instead of deleting the customers, would be to address the issue that having them causes. For example, if the issue is that the inactive customers are 'cluttering up' the list when users look at the customer list, then I would recommend renaming them instead. Use the (now free for GP 10.0 and 2010) Customer Modifier tool and rename all the inactive customers to sort at the bottom, maybe add a 'ZZ-' in front or something like that. If the issue is reporting, then many out-of-the-box GP reports, any SmartLists and certainly any custom reports can be set up to exclude inactive customers if desired.

Just my 2 cents.

Victoria Yudin
Dynamics GP MVP 2005 - 2012
Use Crystal Reports and SSRS with GP:

http://www.GPReportsViewer.com/gpreports.html

blog:

http://victoriayudin.com

 

[mbogdanoff]

Thanks Victoria for the feedback. Our issue is clutter and report generation speed. In our case, we don't need the history data. And if we ever did, we can load a backed-up version of our data. My biggest worry is that it could cause errors in the account balances, etc. However it sounds like, from reading other threads where people say they use this as a regular clean-up routine, there's no issue with that. Thanks again for the feedback and I'll definitely share your alternative ideas.

Michael

 

[slantsix]

Another option is to just delete them from the customer master and leave the transactions in place. It's the same thing the system does when you are allowed to delete a 'temporary' vendor. If you ever need to hook up the transactions with the now deleted customer, just re-enter the customer ID and everything will hook up again.

Beware that you cannot reuse the customer id without hooking back up all of the transactions.

slantsix


Kind regards,

Leslie