old transactions

[bclough]

I am a contractor who uses PCA (dos for windows version), I have a friend who uses Peachtree Complete Accounting for Windows. He has been trying to delete old jobs from job cost and old customers from AR. The error message that results from these attempts reports that there are still transaction pertinant to these accounts. All of these accounts and any transactions that would be hiding somewhere are from several years ago. In fact they are from when my friend was using PCA for dos - all of these items were from data that was brought forward from the old version to the new when he upgraded his software. I have not been able to find a way to access these transactions. Any help much appreciated.

[arcadia2]

I also have been trying to get old transactions out of Peachtree Complete Accounting to no avail. The old transactions are logged to period 0 and PCA won't allow you to delete these transactions. I tried to delete them from bTrieve but it asked for a password but we don't have the files password protected

[bclough]

Thanks Arcadia, What is bTrieve? I am not familiar with it. What about making your files password protected and then using the password?

[Robert Walraven]

You need the Btrieve owner name for the files to delete records from Btrieve. In earlier versions Peachtree had a fixed owner name for all files but from 8.02 forward they have an owner name they generate internally that varies from one company to the next and changes if you enable Crystal Reports for Peachtree.

However, even if you knew the owner name you do NOT want to simply delete journal records because there is related data in other parts of the database that must be adjusted so that your books are not thrown off. Posting a journal record in the first place can affect up to 7 different files. Also if you remove these early records then your balance sheet will change, which creates problems trying to reconcile your income tax. The only way around this would be to compensate by adding some beginning balance records to offset the records you removed.

[arcadia2]

I'm not worried about changing the accounts if I can get rid of the old transactions. I can always make a journal entry to correct for these errors. Is there anyway to find the Owner Name Peachtree assigns to these files? I would make backups so there is no real danger of hurting anything if the deletions caused problems.

[Robert Walraven]

Peachtree doesn't make the owner name public and I'm not aware of any Btrieve tools for recovering the owner name.

However, I say it again - you can't simply rip out these transactions because they do not stand alone. Trying to put your books back in balance would be an almost impossible task afterwards.

The easiest way around the problem is to start your company over again following the procedures in the Peachtree user's guide.

[bclough]

Ah geez fellas, you guys are getting way beyond me. Answer some basics for me please. What is Btrieve? I'm not able to find any of these transactions that are associated with the vendors or jobs that we wish to get rid of. Are we saying that this happened because someone muddled the proceedure for updating from PCA for dos to PCA for windows. Why wouldn't these transactions go away like anything else from 2 or three years ago. Aren't these transactions reflected in retained earnings by now? Robert when you say "start the company over again" do you mean from the original transfer of data from old pca and then re-enter the last 2 years worth or just close it all out and enter new beginning balances?

[Robert Walraven]

Sorry blcough, you are right. I was responding to Arcadia2 rather than you.

What is Btrieve?

Btrieve is the record management system used by Peachtree to actually read and write blobs of information to disk. Btrieve is not a database tool, simply a blob reader/writer. Btrieve has been around for many years and many accounting systems that were written a while back use it because it is very efficient and works across a network.

One unfortunate problem with Peachtree's use of Btrieve is that they continue to use V6.15, which Pervasive, the manufacturer of Btrieve, now classifies as obsolete. That means if there are any problems with 6.15, they are not going to be fixed with new versions of Peachtree unless Peachtree decides to undate, which they are probably loath to do because of the increased licensing cost.

Addressing your original problem - many kinds of data in Peachtree, jobs included, are not standalone pieces of information but are woven into a complex web of details. This is not something that Peachtree is doing in particular - it is just the way accounting systems need to be. Trying to remove an old job would mean carefully extracting the corresponding information from the journal records that refer to the job - not an easy task in general.

However, even more important, once the books are closed for a year they are not supposed to be touched after that. To do so brings into question any financial reports that are run for following years. For example, suppose there are time tickets, invoices and receipts that refer to a particular job; then removing that job would change the balance sheet.

We've just seen what trouble Enron got into cooking the data. Although what your friend wants to is certainly innocent, it nevertheless is a no-no from an accounting point of view.

[arcadia2]

I certainly agree with you, Robert, about the dangers of just ripping out data from Peachtree. I noticed that Peachtree assigned the old transactions to Period 0 and you can't change to that period. I was hoping to change the old transactions to Period 1 with bTrieve thinking Peachtree might allow me to delete the transactions. The transactions all show a zero balance but must contain a very small number due to roundoff. Peachtree has never been good at mathematics. Again, I would do this on a backup copy so that any damage would be easily reversed. I also agree that the real solution is to create the company anew and avoid these kinds of errors in the future.

[Robert Walraven]

An interesting idea. I would try changing the period to 15 so that it falls in the current year: if you also change the TrxDate to correspond to a date in period 15 then you might just be able to delete the record using Peachtree, which would stand a much better chance of doing it correctly. (Unpost the data first.) If this actually works, let us know. However, it will still alter your balance sheet, so you might need to make some appropriate GL adjustment afterward.