When/Should you delete old records from Posted tables.

Our posted tables. i.e 113, 121, 123 (Sales, Purchase) are getting quite large with old information we really don’t need.

Is there a practice procedure to delete these older entries out or should they never be touched??

Thanks in advance,

Greg

They shudn’t be atleast by opening table and pressing F4 :slight_smile: . But u can explore date compression that is feature available in NAV, it might be helpful for you in case of too old data.

Hey!

Do you have a corporate policy for data retention?

Do you have physical copies of all these documents too?

If the database has enough free space and you have optimised all tables in Navision then these tables should not cause any performance problems.

Can you make a backup of the database and store that i a secure environment?

IF you can satsisfy yourselve and your company policies then I think deleting the Posted documents that are more than 2 years is a reasonable procedure.

You will need a developer licence (don’t forget to grant the permissions to the new object) to remove the posted documents (don’t foget the posted doucment dimensions)…

You will need to align these with any legal requirements for document reproduction, for example a sales invoice must be reprinted for 7 years etc.

Hi Greg,

If a customer requests to delete records from these tables we would recommend creating archive tables and archive the data in the archive table before deletion. Is a fairly straightforward task.

This is different from country to country. At least this is not the case in Denmark. Here it is not a legal requirement that you can reproduce a document once printed, as long as you store a physical copy. This is also why it’s possible to delete the posted sales invoice, once printed in Navision.

If you don’t save a physical copy, then it’s legal if you either are able to recreate the invoice exactly as it looked at time of the original printing. So if you have changed the layout of your invoice (even if you just changed a single field) then you’re actually breaking the law if you are not able to print the report based on the old and unchanged object. So I always recommend my customers to create a monthly PDF file copy and burn it to CDROM. This way you can just delete the posted sales documents. At least from a legally point, as I have seen many developers who have been creating statistical reports based on the posted sales documents. This is in my opinion bad practice and should be avoided.

In regards to the posted purchase documents, then there is no legal requirement that say you need to save them. All that is required is that you store the physical purchase documents and the posted ledger entries.

In regards to the 7 years, then this rule is that you have to store all physical documents and documents you only have electronically for 5 years (to the end current accounting year plus 5 years) in Denmark.