Cannot delete account with no transactions

1

I have an expense account with no transactions showing on the chart of accounts. When I try to delete it, I get an error message telling me ‘This record cannot be deleted because it is already referenced by another object.’ Which object could that be ? How can I find out ?

2

What account is it? I think it’s because you have use that account for some transaction…

3

There are some accounts you cannot delete, because they are linked by hard software coding into overall functionality of Manager. If you go to Setting >> Chart of Accounts and select Edit for an account, you can tell. Those that cannot be deleted have no Delete button. Those you can change do.

4

The account has a delete button underneath, so I don’t think it’s a built in account, since the built in ones do not have a delete button.

And there’s no transactions showing for it in the chart of accounts, and no place that I can think of anywhere in the system that I have used this account. My database is fairly recent and has very little data in it yet.

5

Perplexing problem. Let’s verify three things:

  1. At Settings >> Chart of Accounts, is the cell for the affected account’s number of transactions blank? Or does it have a zero, a dash, or anything else in it? It should be blank if there have been no transactions.

  2. On the Summary page, click on the blue dash in the balance column. Does the page that comes up say Empty? Or are there transactions that net out to zero? It should say Empty.

  3. Go to Settings >> Start Date and change the start date to January 1, 0001. Repeat the tests above to see if you accidentally put in an erroneous transaction that hasn’t shown up because it was earlier than your actual start date. Be sure when finished with this test to restore the start date to your actual one.

If all those tests come out with no transactions, you’ve got a problem @lubos will need to solve.

6
  1. It’s completely blank.
  2. The page says ‘Empty’
  3. Same results as before.

What I thought I’d do is rename the account if/when I ever need to create another Expense account. It does not seem to cause any other problems, as far as I can see.

7

I have no clue. I’ll bet it’s something really simple that will make both of us feel silly. I’ll invite @lubos to look into the problem.

8

Could you try to upgrade to the latest version (15.3.11) to see if you can delete it now? I have relaxed some rules in the latest version.

9

Yes, that one did the trick. Thank you !

10

OK, then the problem was that the account was used by a sales order, purchase order, sales quote or recurring sales invoice. None of these entries show up in general ledger but they would prevent an account to be deleted.

11

Hi, I have encountered this issue today. I created two invoices for the same customer. When I try to delete one of the invoices, I receive the message. There are no existing transactions against either invoice. Im not sure if I need to update as I only started to use the tool today.

Thanks, Mark

12

Somewhere, there is a transaction. It might have been an automatic allocation of customer credits. There are several things you can do to find it:

  1. Drill down on every account in the Summary by clicking on blue numbers. You will see a list of transactions that went into that account, even if its balance is zero.

  2. Create a General Ledger Transactions report.

  3. Look in the Customers tab at the customer involved. Click on the amounts (or dashes) in every column.

If your version of Manager was downloaded within the past 6 months, no recent update would affect this. Keep an eye on the forum for Changelog postings to see when features are added that you might want. Often, there are several new versions a week, but most address invisible things.

Also, the offending transaction might not be showing in a balance somewhere if you are using cash accounting. For example, you created a sales invoice, so there should be an amount in Accounts receivable, but that doesn’t show under cash accounting.

1 Like
13

Wow! Thanks for the quick and comprehensive response! I found the cause of the issue (a duplicate transaction) and have subsequently been able to delete the invoice. Thanks very much for your help - greatly appreciated.

Mark