How to Purge old Data From QuickBooks Point of Sale Desktop

The Clean Up Company Data procedure optimizes your Point of Sale data file, resulting in faster searches, lookups, and reporting.  This procedure also allows you to remove old transactions and other information from your data file.  Optionally, you can also choose to compress the data file so that it takes less hard disk space.

Note: In a multi-workstation configuration, this feature is available only from the server workstation.

Warning!  Compressing the data file will significantly add to the amount of time this process takes and may not provide additional improvement to performance.  Compressing a large data file may take several hours and is recommended only if you are running out of physical disk space.  Complete this process during off-hours as it cannot be cancelled once started.

A backup of your current data, before cleanup, will automatically be created during this procedure.

What do I need to know about cleaning up my company data?

This procedure is used to remove old records from your company data file to optimize performance.

What can be removed?

• Closed purchase orders, customer orders, and held documents.
• Transaction (history) documents based on date, including receipts, vouchers, inventory adjustments, transfer slips, and Time Clock records.
• Price Manager price change records and inactive price discounts.

What is not removed?

• Items, customers, vendors, employees, and departments; though if you delete these records manually, this process will optimize your data.
• Documents that refer to other non-removed documents; such as a deposit receipt for an active customer order.

Optional Process

• Compressing your data file.
  • Important Note:  Compressing your data may take several hours and may not further improve performance.  This option is recommended only if you are running out of hard disk space.

Cleaning Up Data at Remote Stores (for Multi Store environments)

This process can be run at each store independently to clean up their local data.

Automatic Backup

Point of Sale automatically creates a backup of your company data file before running this process.  This backup can be restored if necessary.

Before beginning:

• If desired, delete unneeded records from your item, customer, vendor, and employee lists.  These records are not removed by the Clean Up Company Data procedure; however the lists are optimized if records have been manually deleted.
• Close Point of Sale on all workstations except the Server Workstation.

To clean up your data

• From the File menu at the Server Workstation, select "Utilities" and then "Clean Up Company Data".

The Clean Up Company Data wizard is launched.

• Click "Next" to move through the wizard pages, selecting cleanup options.

• Specify if the data file is to be compressed.
• Select the records and/or documents you want to remove.

• If removing history documents, specify a cleanup date.  All selected history documents created prior to the specified data are removed.  Then click "Next".

• Click "Cleanup".

A progress dialog is displayed as the cleanup procedure is carried out.

Notes:

• Transactions and records removed are no longer available on Point of Sale reports, customer history, or vendor history.  However, all transactions are retained on the item history screen (but you can’t QuickZoom to view them).
• Even if no records or documents are selected for removal, this procedure will optimize your data file for better performance.