Deleting Accounts and Making Accounts Inactive

An account is a category of transactions related to a specific type of asset, liability, equity, income, or expense. Your accounts are listed in your chart of accounts. You can customize your chart of accounts to make it more useful. You can delete accounts that are never used, inactivate accounts that are not currently being used, or both.

Many accounts cannot be deleted. You can delete an account if there is no activity in the account and if the account is not required by NetSuite. For example, the non-posting Sales Order account cannot be deleted because NetSuite uses this account for sales orders. Also, certain accounts cannot be deleted because they are required for reporting purposes. Reports are hard-coded with these accounts, therefore, NetSuite does not permit you to delete them. You can, however, make them inactive.

You can delete or make accounts inactive from individual account records, or directly on the chart of accounts list.

To delete or make accounts inactive from account records:

  1. Go to Lists > Accounting > Accounts.

  2. Click the Edit link for an account that you want to delete or mark inactive.

  3. On the Edit Account page, from the Actions list, select Delete.

    If Delete is not available in the Actions list, this account cannot be deleted.

  4. To make an account inactive, check the Inactive box.

    Summary accounts are inactive by default. To automatically inactivate its children accounts, first edit the account record to clear the Summary box and then save the record. Second, edit the account record to clear the Inactive box and then save the record. Third, edit the account record to check the Inactive box and then save the record. All children accounts are updated to inactive status.

    Important:

    Inactivating and activating accounts may limit access to subsidiaries for users assigned custom roles.

  5. Click Save.

To delete or make accounts inactive from the chart of accounts list:

  1. Go to Lists > Accounting > Accounts.

  2. Check the Show Inactives box.

    Your chart of accounts refreshes and an Inactive column and a Delete column are added.

  3. For the accounts you want to delete or make inactive, check the boxes in the appropriate columns.

    Accounts that have the word No in the Delete column cannot be deleted from your chart of accounts.

  4. Click Submit.

Important:

If you receive a warning that an account cannot be deleted because it is associated to a child entity or transaction, you must delete all transactions associated with the account before you can delete the account. You can do a transaction search filtered by the account to review the associated transactions. If you cannot delete these transactions, you can mark the account inactive.

Related Topics:

Changing Names of General Ledger Accounts
Adding or Changing Account Numbers
Merging Accounts
Making Changes to Accounts

General Notices