In Microsoft Dynamics GP, the Receivables Paid Transaction Removal is a utility often overlooked. Dynamics GP users may be unfamiliar with this functionality, or the term “removal” may be interpreted by some users as the “deletion” of their paid or fully applied transactions.
The good news is, the Paid Transaction Removal utility allows users to keep their paid transactions in GP considering your administrator has configured historical transactions to be kept within the database. With this setting in place, the Receivables Paid Transaction Removal utility will move fully applied transactions to history*. Considering this, using the utility will not move unpaid invoices to history. Likewise, partially applied payments will also go untouched. Only fully applied documents will be moved to history.
Now one may ask, what is the importance or need to run this utility?
The answer is: The improved GP performance this utility will facilitate.
Here’s simplistic example:
Think of an excel spreadsheet containing 10,000 rows with the newest records at the bottom of the spreadsheet. You can see it may take several minutes for a user to move from the oldest record on the top of the sheet to the newest one at the bottom.
Now imagine that with these 10,000 rows pertaining to fully applied, unapplied and partially applied documents, a utility will allow you to move all the fully applied documents from one tab on this excel spreadsheet to another Tab called “History”. Following this moving process, your current excel tab which previously contained 10,000 rows is now left with about 70 rows of unapplied and partially applied transactions.You can easily see the user now has the ability to move from the first record on the spreadsheet to the 70th record much faster compared to the previous instance with 10,000 rows.You can also see, in the event the user needs to include a new record on the 71st row, the process will be much faster as opposed to if the user first opened the spreadsheet and had to scroll from the 1st row through 10,000 rows.
In the same perspective, when the Paid Transaction Removal Utility has been ran, it allows fully applied transactions to be moved to history which helps speed up Microsoft Dynamics GP performance and ease the aging of documents as well as other Microsoft Dynamics GP routines.
As always prior to running the paid transaction removal utility (Sales > Routines > Paid Transaction Removal) it is recommended to make a backup of your company database.
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*History: In Microsoft Dynamics GP®, records are stored in tables within a database. They are 5 main types of tables,1 master tables, 2 work tables, 3 open tables, 4 history tables and 4 setup tables.
Master Tables You may have correctly guessed the role of master tables which are designed to store master records such as the information stored in the Customer Cards (Cards > Sales > Customer). The Customer Addresses as well are also stored in a master table (Cards > Sales > Addresses)
Setup Tables You may have also correctly guessed the role of the setup tables. These Tables are used to store setup information, so for example your Receivable Setup information (Microsoft Dynamics GP > Tools > Setup> Sales > Receivables > Options) are stored in a setup table.
Work > Open > History Tables In regards to the work, open and history tables, the concept is quiet simple.
Work Tables Basically, in the receivable module, when a user enters a transaction, (i.e. an invoice) and saves the invoice being created without posting it, this record is stored in work tables. (you can think of the term “work” as work still being done on the transaction, because the user has not yet posted the transaction)
Open Tables When the transaction is posted, the record moves from a work table to an open table.
History Tables Based on these explanations above, hopefully you now understand the difference between a work and an open table but also you are now able to see that whether it is an invoice or a payment, after these transactions are posted, they are stored in open tables.
Now, for example when a payment is fully applied to an invoice and there is no remaining balance on this invoice, and the paid transaction removal process is completed, the fully applied invoice and the fully applied payment in our example, are moved from the open tables to the History tables. So, in short, in the receivable module, the history tables are tables storing records moved from the open tables to the history tables following a paid transaction removal process.
