Clear Completed Jobs

From time to time you may want to clear completed jobs and/or job cost details from your files.One reason may be to clear space from the job costing files for more jobs (though you can always enlarge the files if you run out of room). Another may be that you do not need to keep all the detailed costs back to the start of the job, and only wish to hold onto the current month’s or quarter’s transactions.

On selection of this option you are warned that you should have printed any required reports and taken a security backup:

If your job costing system is linked to the payroll, you are then asked:

If you answer ‘No’, the program returns to the job costing menu — you must update job cost transactions into the payroll before you delete any jobs or job cost records. If you have updated to the payroll, reply ‘Yes’.

Remove Invoiced Job Records

Completed jobs are only removed if their status is I (completed and invoiced) and if you reply ‘Y’ to this question, if you elect to remove ‘invoiced’ jobs then their transactions are also removed. If you reply ‘N’ to this question, then no job records are removed.

Remove Cost Details for Invoiced Job Codes

If you reply ‘Y’ to the previous question then this option is automatically set for you to remove the associated transactions. If you replied ‘N’ then you have the option as to whether to remove the details for invoiced jobs.

Remove Cost Details for Active Jobs

This prompt asks whether you wish to remove cost details for active jobs (status A, C or T). Cost details are only removed when the job record is not set to retain all costs.Respond ‘Y’ or ‘N’ as required.

Retain All Costs

From / To Job Code

If you elected to remove cost details for active jobs then this option allows you to define a range of jobs to be processed. <F4-Select> is available to select the required job codes. If you leave both the ‘from’ and ‘to’ job codes blank then all jobs are processed (subject to other criteria). If you leave the ‘from’ code blank but enter a ‘to’ code then jobs from the start of the file up to the entered ‘to’ code are processed.Similarly if enter a ‘from’ code and leave the ‘to’ code blank then jobs from the entered job code to the end of the file are processed.

OR List of Job Codes

If leave the ‘from’ and ‘to’ job codes blank then you have the option to specify specific job codes to be processed. If you select ‘Y’ you are given the option to enter up to 100 job codes to be processed.

Specify Any Selection Criteria

As an alternative to entering a range of jobs or specific jobs to process you can enter criteria to select the jobs to process – perhaps jobs with a last transaction date before a certain point.

Date for B/F Transactions

If job cost records are going to be removed without removing the job record itself, then a summarised "brought forward” replacement record is written instead for each category of each job. The date you specify here is written into these brought forward transactions.

After setting the cleardown parameters you are prompted firstly to check that the entered parameters are correct and then that you are sure you wish to continue before proceeding with the cleardown process.

This operation is a batch process which can take a little time, depending on the size of your job costing files. As it progresses through its steps a commentary is displayed on the screen so that you can keep track of progress, as illustrated in the screen above.