Deleting Customers

It would appear that customers can be deleted if they have no open ledger entries and thier entries are in closed periods. Has anyone chosen to delete any customers? eg customers who may no longer be in business and are just clogging up your customer list. I have a client who has chosen to delete customers and now has problems when running a Database Test. Should you be able to delete these master records if they result in database test errors? Regards CS

That depends on which type of error you get. Remember that the database test tests the datastructure in the database from a technical point of view. That does not necessarily mean, that there are errors seen from an application integrity point of view. On of the errors you might get, if you have deleted a customer is that Navision will report an inconsistency if you are testing field relations. This is because the customer number is still present in fields that have a relation to the customer that you have deleted. This is technically an error (from a technical viewpoint) but it isn’t an error seen from the application point of view. Lars Strøm Valsted ------------------------- Why can’t programmers tell the difference between Christmas and Halloween? Because OCT(31) = DEC(25)

Actually this capability is not limited to customers…G/L accounts, Vendors and others are in the same boat. I don’t know that I agree from an accounting perspective that this would be desired with the traditional need to keep information for 7 years. I guess this is where the accounting part of Navision and the development environment may tend to clash. We’ve actually put in a line of code to not allow this for our customers…especially the CPA firms that are doing “write-ups”

In general terms I would agree with Bill that important historical accounting data should not be deleted. As couple of additional comments though. 1) I believe the “magic” time period of 7 years has to do with US tax law and the related time period in other countries may be more or less. 2) Users of a system like to get rid of “obsolete” data that, to them, feels like it is cluttering up the system. We have addressed that by every one, two or three years (depending on the customer site) creating an “archive” backup of the database which is kept on a single user workstation or auxilary server for access in single user mode only. The customer is then allowed (and assisted) to purge what can safely be identified as operationally obsolete data. But through the use of the archive copy, we satisfy the accounting records retention requirement. Dave Studebaker das@libertyforever.com Liberty Grove Software A Navision Services Partner