The Clear Audit Trail option deletes transactions which meet certain criteria. An opening balance journal shows the balance of these deleted transactions. You can view the removed transactions on the Audit Trail Historic reports.

CAUTION: Before clearing your audit trail, we recommend taking a backup and creating an archive of your data.

Criteria

Clear Audit Trail removes all transactions that meet the following criteria:

• Dated on or before the date you specify
• Date to be before your current financial year
• Fully paid
• VAT reconciled, if applicable
• Bank reconciled, if applicable
• CIS Reconciled, if applicable
• Allocated transactions. The linked transactions must also meet the criteria

Transactions that don't meet the criteria remain in the audit trail.

In addition to clearing your audit trail, you can remove any unwanted quotations, invoices, credits and orders.

 TIP: We recommend that you run this routine on the computer which holds your accounts data.

To run the Clear Audit Trail

 NOTE: Clearing the audit trail affects retrospective reports that use transactional data, we recommend running any important reports before clearing the transactional history.

1. Click Tools then click Period End and Clear Audit Trail.
2. Enter the date you want to clear transactions up to and click Clear audit trail.
3. Back up your data.
4. Click OK, then Close and click Close to view the removed transactions.

You've now cleared your audit trail up to and including the specified date. To reclaim disk space after removing transactions, you can compress your data.

To check the number of transactions remaining on the audit trail:

• Click Help then About and under Data Information check Splits

Postings

When you run a Clear Audit Trail, an opening balance journal posts to your nominal codes replacing the removed transactions.

Transactions not removed

Find out why transactions remain on your audit trail after running the clear audit trail process.

What next?

After removing old transactions, you can remove old, unused records, invoices and orders:

• Delete records 
• Delete Invoices and orders
• Delete Purchase orders

 NOTE: The Clear Audit Trail doesn't affect projects. Follow our separate article to delete a project record.