? Deleting old vedors / contributors

[gospeltab]

Hi,

The person in charge of entering contributions wants to delete all people that have given to the church, but no longer do in an effort to make things more streamlined and free up envelop numbers. (We are a fairly small church so that in itself is not an issue...)

I feel that if someone has given money to the church or they are a vendor that has been paid by the church - their information needs to be maintained even if it is marked "inactive."

I would appreciate advice on this...

Thanks!
Deanne

[NeilZ]

Hi,

The person in charge of entering contributions wants to delete all people that have given to the church, but no longer do in an effort to make things more streamlined and free up envelop numbers. (We are a fairly small church so that in itself is not an issue...)

I feel that if someone has given money to the church or they are a vendor that has been paid by the church - their information needs to be maintained even if it is marked "inactive."

I would appreciate advice on this...

Thanks!
Deanne

The IRS says that Contributions information must be maintained for at least FOUR years. Business type information, such as bills paid, etc, must also be maintained for FOUR years. I myself have been saving business accounting records for seven years, just to be on the safe side. http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p1828.pdf IRS Pub 1828

Now nothing says that you can't do a backup of the PCPlus database, then clean up as she wants, however, if you backup using the current version, you won't be able to restore the data to any future version, as the database changes.

So if you have v10.4, and want to update to 11.5, you'll have to keep a copy of 10.4 around to view the old data.

If she wants to clear up the envelope numbers to eliminate some of the gaps, what you should do is move some of the people to an 'archive area' of numbers, then renumber the rest.

Here are some threads that will help you with this:


Renumbering: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=5446

This post of mine basically gives the same info as above, but also lists a scheme that breaks down envelopes numbers into areas such as archive, visitor contributions, etc:
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=4431&p=15399#p15399