Accounts
Clear Audit Trail
Once you have run the year end routine and archived the data, it can be a good idea to clear the audit trail depending on the number of transactions you have. Clearing the Audit Trail removes transactions which meets a specific criteria. An opening balance journal is posted that stands for the balance of the removed transactions. The audit trail history holds the details of the removed transactions.
Criteria
Clear Audit Trail removes all transactions that meet the following criteria:
- Date on or before the date you specify.
- Date must be 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 transaction that does not meet all of the above criteria are not cleared from the audit trail.
Memo – We recommend running Clear Audit Trail routine on the computer that holds your accounts data. This routine might take some time.
Clearing the Audit Trail affects retrospective reports that use transactional data, we recommend running any important reports before clearing the transactional history, remember you can always go into your archive data to run reports.
To Clear Audit Trail
- Click Tools then click Period End and Clear Audit Trail.
- Enter the date you want to clear transactions up to and click Clear audit trail.
- Create a backup, click Browse and select the required folder for the backup and click OK, then click OK and click OK.
- To view the removed transactions, click OK then click Close and click Close.
Postings
When you run a Clear Audit Trail, an opening balance journal posts to your nominal codes to replace the removed transactions.
You can then remove old, unused records, invoices and orders and then compress your data, see earlier articles on how to do this.
If you would like help on Clearing the Audit Trail or removing old records, invoices and orders and compressing your data or need any other help with your Sage Accounts, please contact us
