I am cleaning up our Chart of Accounts in advance of revising it. We currently have 3,425 accounts, and 114 Depts. I can go back to the fiscal year ended Mar 31/08 under the Fiscal Period option.

1. Is there a way to delete multiple accounts at the same time?
2. Is there a way to determine what accounts have no history in them in the comparative periods so I know for sure what accounts can be deleted?

Thank you.

Hi EMB

There is no way to mass delete accounts, using Ledger itself. It's possible with Toolkit for Adagio, by Dakota Software. Toolkit lets you (among other things) merge two accounts together, which effectively deletes one of the them, and you can import mass merges from an Excel spreadsheet. The strategy is to create a dummy account called "Deleted accounts" and merge into it. But...

1) it costs money
2) you have to be careful because it doesn't check the balances
3) you can't only merge accounts with the same account type - Balance Sheet into Balance Sheet and Income/Expense into Income/Expense

One advantage of doing this is if you accidentally merge an account with a prior year balance, at least the trial balance will still balance.

Steve

Hi EMB,

In the Maintenance / Purge Fiscal Year function, there is an option to 'Delete accounts with no activity', when the oldest fiscal year has something purged. Here is the information about this option from the Help file:
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Enable this option if you would like Adagio to delete accounts that have had no activity after the fiscal year has been purged. When enabled, the fiscal year is purged, then accounts are deleted in subsequent years if they had no activity (were unused) in the years following the purged year.

Deleted accounts must have an Opening balance = 0.00, Current balance = 0.00, Total net changes = 0.00 and no posted transactions (even those that net to 0.00).

NOTE: Accounts-Departments that are deleted are referenced in the Application Log that may be seen using Adagio GridView.
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This is the only way to mass delete accounts and there is no user-based selection involved, so it would be prudent to make a backup copy of your Ledger data and try out this process on the backup copy, if this was an interesting route to go.

Thank you, Steve. We have purchased the Toolkit, but I wanted to clean up the Chart of Accounts a bit before I change the numbering system.

Thank you Softrak Tech Support. I was able to delete 1419 accounts, leaving me with just 2006 to work with for revising our Chart of Accounts. Still a lot, but I was able to get rid of a lot too.