Why It Is a Bad Idea to Delete a Customer or an Item Record

Why It Is a Bad Idea to Delete a Customer or an Item Record

Release Date: 04/16/2024
Version: 7.x & Up

Q - If a customer is deleted after a price code file entry is made, how do we remove it? There are errors in the manual interface and the import file if the customer is Not On File. We can’t manually delete the entry and our understanding is that we cannot process import files if there are errors.

We should be able to delete any entries whether or not they pass validation. Should this work?

In this case, we took the entries for the bad customer out to continue working. A hack would be to create that customer again, but I don’t want to do that.

See screenshot below of what we are seeing.


A - When you try to delete a customer, Elliott is making some limited checks of foreign key references. The check is not exhaustive. Hence you can delete a customer even though that customer is still being referenced in other tables. For this reason, we do not recommend deleting a customer unless you know for sure there is no foreign key reference. For example, if you just added a customer and you know there's no activity for this customer. Then it is safe to delete this customer.  Otherwise, a safer way is to obsolete the customer by changing the name to “** DO NOT USED **” and put the customer credit hold to “Y”…etc.

Since you did delete the customer and we are in the predicament now, I can think of a few ways to proceed:

  1. Add the customer back temporarily and delete the price code records. You can delete the customer afterwards.  But there’s no guarantee you won’t run into problems elsewhere.
  2. We can use PSQL Control Center to delete these price code records.
  3. We can come up with a change in the “Import Price Code Future Price” application so that when you try to “Delete,” we don’t check the customer foreign key and it won’t error out. You can post an idea on the Elliott Support Portal and we can see if this idea gains supports from other Elliott users.  
A similar issue applies to Item Master. We do not recommend that you delete an item record if that item has activities including history.  You should simply obsolete that item instead.

EMK


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