Distribution, Manufacturing, and Internet Modules

[jeffc]

What is the best process to delete very old inventory items that are in MAS 4.40 migrated from an older version of MAS with history attached to it?

[DFeller]

Use the Inventory change utility.

Dawn

[BShockley]

You should have deleted the items prior to the upgrade.

Deleting items in 4.4 is very slow, but you can still do it.

[skirmoochsage]

Dawn and BShockley are correct in their instruction on how to delete old inventory items and that it is a big process, but if you can wait till the 4.50 release, a feature has been added to make an item inactive so you can optionally not show the item in the list of items to sell. Your partner/reseller can give you more information on the upcoming release.

[Broadfoot]

The Inactive Item check box appeared in 4.4 PU6 in inventory maintenance main tab.

From MAS Help.

"Select this check box to make the item inactive. If an item is inactive, it cannot be entered when adding a line in Sales Order Entry, Sales Order Invoice Data Entry, Purchase Order Entry, Receipt of Goods Entry, Receipt of Invoice Entry, and Material Requisition Issue Entry. An inactive item can be entered when adding a line in Return of Goods Entry and Inventory Management Transaction Entry only if the appropriate security is set up. Alternately, if Discontinued is selected at the Product Type field and the item is entered in a data entry task, a message dialog box appears stating that the item is discontinued and asking whether or not to continue. If you click Continue, the item is accepted."

[DLB]

Items with history can no longer be deleted due to the tie between the inventory history and transaction tables as of 4.40.  this allows data to be recalculated when fiscal year dates change.  As was mentioned, a good way to minimize the pain (if deleting old history is not an option) is to merge all of the old items into a single item (or 6 items since you would need one per valuation method) and then just skip (or ignore) these six items when you no longer care to see your old inventory.

[Broadfoot]

I believe the Inactive Item Feature is the replacement for deletion of an item.  The Change/Delete Item utility will not work until any history related to the item is purged.  The Inactive Item Feature keeps the item out of the way until it's history is old enough to be cleaned up with an inventory wide purge.

This is similar to the way deleting a GL account is handled in 4.x. In GL it is called 'Deleted' but the account isn't really deleted until it's history expires. 

It would be nice if there was an auto purge option where you could designate the number of years to keep inventory history like you can in GL but there are probably reasons why they didn't do that.

[BShockley]

Maybe this should be in a new thread, but what is Sage's plan in regards to increasing the performance of the merge process in 4.4?

Using the inactive item flag may help with those items that need to be deleted; however, for items that need renumbering or merging, is Sage planning on addressing the slow performance in 4.4?

Renumbering and merging items in 4.3 and prior versions was so much faster compared to 4.4.

This is a huge problem for clients that use the Inventory module.

This post is not intended to stir the pot or bash Sage, I would just like to know if the problem is going to be addressed in a future update or release.

Thanks

[DFeller]

There is a separate thread about the performance issue already.

Dawn