Best way to get rid of an old employee?

Good one Frank,

As far as the question, whether you delete the employee or inactivate them depends on whether you need to report on their historical transactions.  The transactions aren't deleted, but you can't use the standard inquiry windows and reports to pull data. If you decide you would like to bring them back, all you need to do is set up their employee ID number and the transactions will hook up.

That being said, remember not to accidentally re-use the ID of a deleted employee.  You would delete the employee in payroll Utilities: Remove Inactive Records

Kind regards,

Leslie

Just out of curiosity what is the legal restriction to deleting employee data? I know you need to emails for 7 years and I would think employee data would be at least as important.

Richard,

That's when you realize you need to 'recreate' them <grinning>. You're right about retention, there are so many laws about that these days.

Kind regards,

Leslie

Well I know a place with hungry gators! Although feeding them GP users may give them a sour taste in their mouths. With disk storage space so cheap these days storage space is certainly not a concern. You know as soon as you delete someone or something you immediately need it. Just like cleaning out your garage. Something sits there unused for 20 years so you finally throw it out and them immediately you find a need for it.

If you are using H\R, I would first Archive the employee, then you could delete the employee.   For data retention, I would google for a list of how long to keep records.

Thanks everyone for the answers, got a couple of kicks out of reading them :) One thing that I found that might be different is that, to delete the employee ID, it requires you to remove all summary data of the employee's transactions. So it looks like you don't get the option of recreating the ID again in the future to hook up historical transactions.

If the volume warrants, you could always consider using the Company Data Archive product from Professional Advantage. You could archive just the payroll information and then after it has been moved over to the archive company, then delete all traces from the production company. So essentially you would have an archive company with just archived payroll information. That would cover you for any audit.