Changing nominal ledgers and historic entries

[Michel]

Hi everyone,

I tried to find some documentation on the following topic, but I haven’t found any. However, I am sure I am not the only one with that issue, so I hope for the Quickfile hivemind helping me out here!

Problem: I have used a number of custom nominal sales, purchases, and expenses accounts to satisfy our bookkeeping and reporting needs, across a number of financial years. Some of these nominal accounts do not fit our needs anymore, and I would like to change them. However, I am hesitant to just willy-nilly remove these accounts primarily because of their historic use.
I know that I can easily solve that for the use case of a current financial year without historic data for that nominal account, but that is not my issue.

Question(s):

1. How can I safely remove a nominal account without losing historic data for past financial years? (Year-end procedure locks the accounts!)
2. What would be a sensible policy or transition procedure for re-assigning discontinued nominal accounts (and their numbers!) that have become available again as part of safe deletion via question 1?

Thanks for your help!

Cheers,
Michel

[ian_roberts]

Re point 1: You can’t - QuickFile won’t let you delete a nominal that has any transactions posted to it. But if these are P&L codes that haven’t been used since the last year end then they will have a zero balance anyway. You could simply start using them again now but if you change their names I suspect it’ll change the historic record as well (the old accounts will show the code under the new name) so you might be safer just using new numbers anyway.