The Clear Audit Trail option removes transactions which meet a specific criteria. An opening balance journal represents the balance of the removed transactions. The audit trail history holds the details of the removed transactions.

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 must before your current financial year
• Fully paid
• VAT reconciled, if applicable
• Bank reconciled, if applicable
• CIS Reconciled, if applicable
• If the transaction is allocated, the linked transactions must also meet all of the above criteria

Any transactions that don't meet all of the criteria aren't cleared from the audit trail.

As well as clearing your audit trail, you may also want to 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 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. Create a backup: to run a backup, click Browse and select the required folder for the backup and click OK, then click OK and click OK.
4. To view the removed transactions click OK then click Close and click Close.

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 click About and under Data Information check Splits. This is the total number of transactions remaining on your audit trail.

Postings

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

What next?

After removing old transactions, you can remove old, unused records, invoices and orders. The following articles advise further:

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

 NOTE: The Clear Audit Trail doesn't affect projects. If you need to delete a project record you can follow this handy guide.