Blocking deletion of G/L accounts

Enabled for	Public preview	General availability
Users, automatically	Jan 4, 2022	Apr 1, 2022

Business value

Maintenance of the chart of accounts takes place only a few times, once it's been set up for an organization, but it does occur. To help avoid accidental deletion of general ledger (G/L) accounts, this release wave adds an extra check.

Feature details

Though relatively rare, changing business needs might require you to make a change in your chart of accounts that involves deleting one or more accounts. Before you delete an account, you must balance the account to zero and then close the fiscal year to prevent new entries from being added to the account. Also, most countries and regions have requirements for how long businesses must store their financial data. To help ensure that you don’t delete an account that has entries within the period where they must be kept, you can specify the start date of the period for which your country or region requires you to store financial data in the Check G/L Acc. Deletion After field on the General Ledger Setup page. For example, If you must keep data for five years, and today’s date is 2/9/2022, you would enter a date of 12/31/2016. If you do, Business Central will inform you if you have accounts with entries that you must keep. You probably shouldn’t delete accounts that have entries, but you can if you must.

To further safeguard accounts from accidentally being deleted, we’ve added the Block Deletion of G/L Accounts toggle to the General Ledger Setup page. If you turn on the toggle, Business Central will prevent users from deleting accounts that have entries after the date that is specified in the Check G/L Acc. Deletion After field. If you must delete such accounts, a user who can access the General Ledger Setup page can turn off the Block Deletion of G/L Accounts toggle.

We recommend that you turn on the Block Deletion of G/L Accounts toggle and that you always have a date set in the Check G/L Acc. Deletion After field.

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See also

Understanding the General Ledger and the Chart of Accounts (docs)