Global Delete Help

Whitney Shelton

Hey all! I am trying to do a global delete on records we have with their one and only gift before 2000. Because they each have one gift, it creates exceptions for all of them.

Suggestions on how to go about this process? Do I need to do a global delete of each gift on the query list and then do the global delete on the constituents?

For background, because I know people are going NO STOP DON'T DO IT…. I have to do it to get our constituent count below the threshold. We have exhausted and removed all other constituents with no giving history and nothing received in honor/memorial.

Help please

Austen Brown

@Whitney Shelton - I highly recommend moving the gifts on the records you plan to delete to another record, such as your Anonymous record, so they are not lost; I recommend putting the original donor's name in a gift attribute, for easy searching later if need. Please, please, please do not delete gift records you may need them in the future and they do not contribute to the overall record count. Once you get the gifts moved and taken care of, the system will allow you to delete the constituent records in question.

JoAnn Strommen

@Whitney Shelton
Great idea in response from @Austen. I would probably create one specific record “Historical Giving Anonymous” (FN - History, LN Anonymous) or something just so the gifts don't cause confusion on the “anonymous” record.

Love that solution if you must delete constituent records.

Faith Murray

@Whitney Shelton
“Third-ing” the excellent suggestion from @Austen Brown to move to an Anonymous record, and I also like @JoAnn Strommen's suggestion of a dedicated historical record. A benefit to keeping the old gift records is if you have any type of integration with FE (and possibly other accounting softwares), deleting very old gifts can mess up the integration functionality.

In our system, for example, I cannot delete any gift in a “closed” year after the year 2000 (the year we adopted Financial Edge), or else we can't pull over any new gifts. I found that out the hard way when someone deleted a gift by mistake; luckily we still had our 7-year-stash of paper copies so I could re-create the gift record. It doesn't seem to matter for gifts imported from before we adopted FE.

Carolyn Copp

@Whitney Shelton…just curious…have you done this yet? How did it go? I also like Austen's suggestion about adding a gift attribute.