Answer: Maintaining accurate Department Records is as essential as maintaining the Inventory Records that belong to them. Keeping unused Department Records around only serves to unnecessarily inflate the amount of data that needs to be processed, increase the chance of the wrong department being used, and use up company time whenever one of these inactive records is encountered. Thankfully, deleting Department Records is an easy process that doesn't take much time to do, especially for companies that keep accurate Inventory Records, to begin with.
Enterprise Edition Users:
For a Department Record to be deleted, it must first have no Inventory Records assigned to it. If Inventory Records are currently assigned to that Department Record, those Inventory Records must first be deleted or reassigned to another department before this department can be deleted.
- To delete a Department Record, navigate in Solid Business Central™ to [Datafile / Department / View], and display the Department Record that needs to be deleted. Then, use the [Delete] key on the keyboard and answer 'Y' to the question, "Do you wish to delete this Department?"
If the message displays 'This Department is in use … cannot cancel!', there are currently Inventory Records assigned to this Department Record. Those Inventory Records must first be identified and then either deleted or reassigned to another department before this Department Record can be deleted.
- To identify what Inventory Records are still assigned to this Department Record, in Solid Business Central™, navigate to [Datafile / Inventory / View] and use [F8 - Find] to search for records belonging to this department. From the 'Find an Inventory Item' menu, select 'Dept' and type in the Department ID for this Department Record. Using [CTRL+END] will list all inventory items belonging to this department.
- To reassign an Inventory Record to another department, from the end of step 1 above, use the [Enter] key to select one of the items in need of reassignment, which will display that item's Inventory Record. Use [F2 - Edit] to make changes to this record, and change the 'Dept' field to a different Department ID. Save the change with [CTRL+END], and repeat steps 1 and 2 for all other Inventory Records that need to be reassigned to different departments.
- To delete an Inventory Record from the list of items belonging to this department from the end of step 1, copy down the Item IDs (Part #s) of all items belonging to this Department Record that need to be deleted. Once that list is compiled, follow the steps in Article #85 How to Delete an Inventory Item in Solid Business Central for information on deleting Inventory Records.
Once there are no more Inventory Records assigned to this Department Record, it's now ready to be deleted, as per the instructions at the start.