Making an Inventory Account Inactive

An inventory should never be deleted even when the inventory no longer exists unless there have never been any transactions with the inventory item. It is permissible to delete an inventory item when no new transactions have occurred within the years maintained by the system. For example, if all transactions that occurred four years ago or before have been removed from the system using the purge utility, and there have been no transactions with an inventory item Garden Hose in the past four years, then the Garden Hose inventory item could be deleted.

The following alternatives to deleting the inventory item are recommended:

  1. Merge an inventory item into another account. This option is the preferred option if accounts were duplicated or two accounts need to be merged into one. Review the Standard Features > Merging Accounts vs. Deleting Accounts section of the Main Documentation for more details.

  2. Change an inventory item to inactive status. Once an inventory item is made inactive, it will be removed from a number of reports. An inactive product may remain in the same folder in which it existed when active, but may be hidden from search lists by unselecting Show Inactive at the bottom of the list. Items can be marked inactive using one of the following two methods:

Review the following sections for more details on each option.

Manually set an item as inactive

This is the recommended method for a few individual items. Complete the following steps to make a single inventory item inactive:

    1. Open the inventory item window by selecting Inventory > Product Catalog.

    2. Choose the item you wish to make inactive and open the inventory item record.

    3. Enable the Inactive option on the General tab.

    4. Save the inventory information by clicking the OK button.

Utility to Mark a Group of Items Inactive

This utility gives the user to mark an entire group of items inactive based on the following criteria:

  1. The item counts must be zero

  2. The activity such as purchases, sales, or other activity with this item was before a user specified date

  3. The user can identify a folder or range of inventory item IDs.

  4. The user has the option to disable the selected option for any item at the end of the utility wizard as shown below.

Complete the following steps to launch the utility to inactivate a group of inventory items:

  1. Launch the utility by selecting Inventory > Utilities > Inactivate Inventory Items from the main EBMS menu to open the following dialog:

  2. Select the Use Folder option and set the sub-folder to evaluate. All sub-folders below the Use Folder folder will also be included. This utility is powerful and should be used with caution. Run the utility multiple times selecting individual folders rather than processing a large number of inventory items using a root folder.   

  3. Enable the Only mark items from option only to select a limited range of items within the selected sub-folder. Select the desired range of inventory ID codes to limit the query. Disable this option to include all items within the selected folder.   

  4. Use the Advanced Query button to add user defined queries. Review the Standard Features > Advanced Query Options section of the main documentation for more details and instructions on using queries.

  5. Click Next to continue to open the following page:                                                        

  6. Set the Last Activity Date to limit the inclusion of all inventory items with activity since this date. This excludes any item that has been purchased, sold, or other activity since this date. Click Next to continue to the query list shown below:                                                                 

  7. All items that are slated to be made inactive are listed in this dialog. Note that all items with counts, with activity since the Last Activity Date, or not within the folder or other query will be excluded.  

  8. Disable the Mark Inactive option to exclude a specific item from being moved as Inactive. Click on the Cancel button to cancel the process.

  9. Click the Next button to set the items with an inactive status. Note that this process can not be reversed so use with caution. The following dialog will appear indicating the number of items inactivated as shown below:                                                                                  

  10. Click Finish to complete. Repeat to inactivate other groups of items.

NOTE: All inactive (accounts, vendors, etc.) will be grayed on the search lists when the Show Inactive option is enabled at the bottom of the list.