Sage 100

I have a second end user who has a large # of GL accounts which they want to delete. I flagged them all as Delete in Account Maintenance. From what I can see the only way to have Sage automatically delete this is at year-end closing. Does anyone know if this also happens during month end? I understand the reasoning behind this but it's not convenient when a customer asks you to ""clean up"" their accounts and you tell them they have to wait a year for them to disappear. Yes, I am contemplating closing the year again then setting the date back to the current period unless someone tells me there's a better way to approach this.

None of the accounts had activity as far back as you're keeping history, did they?

You can run the General Ledger utility to delete accounts; if the Accounts selected do not have activity or budget data, they are immediately deleted. If they do have activity, then they are marked for deletion and will only be deleted at year end if the activity is removed during the year end process.

that's good to know. Can I que up a list of accounts? It looked like I could do individually or ranges but not a list?

you could do an ""equal to' and separate each account number with a comma in the ""value"" box. There is a limit to how many characters you can put in that box so if you have a really large number you may need to run it several times. I've made use of it before in invoice printing when client gave me a large list of invoices they had to reprint but they were not sequential or anything

I tested and it looks like I can go through and select non-consecutive accounts and que up a bunch to be deleted. I'm not entirely sure this is faster than account maintenance although presumably, this can also be populated by VI.

if you have the list in excel, pivot the list so it is all in one row then export it to a .csv (so the list is separated by commas) then you can cut and past it into the value box. again, watch that limit, Sage will cut off after so many characters. (256 or 512 I think)

I have 260 accounts - in the past I've just changed the account status to DELETE in account maintenance and figured a year-end would auto purge anything without history. I haven't tested whether a month-end would do the same.

I forgot the steps on how to change a column in excel into a row, so I looked it up. if anyone is interested you highlight the column, Right-click and hit ""copy"" then Right-Click in any empty cell and choose Paste Options > Transpose.

Note: GL_DeleteAccountsWork.M4T appears to be the table holding this data. I do not see a way to use VI to populate it.

Check out GL_ChangeAccounts.M4T

I don't think those are driving the same file. The Change accounts is for merges and renumbers. The Delete Accounts is now a completely separate menu option and the UI is different for Delete too.

Yep, you're right. It doesn't even allow you to delay/save like the other Delete/Change screens. I did check the file while the prompt to print was up (assumed the records would be saved then) and nothing in the Change file.

Merge into one account??

I think I may have to merge since I am now looking at significant detail back in the year 2000 for these ""delete"" accounts and the customer is exceptionally unwilling to purge any history.

I hate the delete function as I have had several clients do this and the balance sheet goes out of balance. As long as you merge with a like type account it shouldn't pose a problem. But most of my clients have their history set to the maximum though.

This one is particularly thorny because it's a bunch of GL accounts that came through during a 3.x to 4.4 upgrade. If the customer is unwilling to purge history then it is very difficult to get rid of these accounts. Merging large numbers of them is also problematic because as you note they only merge with same type accounts.

Copy live company to new company code, and delete outdated accounts from new company code. The customer can always look back at the original company.