Hello!
Our Product Groups are old and bloated and need to be refined. So we want to delete some and remake others.
My concern is how this will impact Finance and GL Accounts?
I am afraid of breaking something, of course.
Thank you!
I think you’re probably safe, but I would wait for a couple other people to confirm in case I’m mistaken.
Product Groups just steer the ship. When a transaction comes through, the assigned Product Group on the order, job, etc. steers the value of that transaction into the correct GL bucket.
It will just be a sizeable task to reassign any default product groups you may have on parts. Also… if you delete the old, it may not LET you delete them if they’re actively assigned to any parts. So, you may have to remove all references first before you can delete.
Too bad there’s not an inactive flag on Product Groups… anyways…
I would set up your new groups, with corresponding GL controls, and test them out thoroughly. If they’re all working and you financials go to the right places in your testing, then you’re probably safe to delete the old… or… if you’re afraid of deleting them, you could just leave them there and “disarm” them by removing their GL Controls. You could also change their descriptions to “DO NOT USE!”
But, again, since there’s no inactive flag system on PG’s… they’ll still show in drop down lists and get in the way.
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I would agree with @dcamlin here. I am not a big fan of deleting anything. I learnt that hard way lol.
As David said, you can change description or disarm them, still there are few TALENTED users to accidentally select the PGs which have this DO NOT USE description.
Instead, I would create a UD field at Product Group table. Name it Inactive(boolean). Mark it to true for the PGs I want, go into all dropdowns available in the system(likely Quote/Order/Job/PO) and filter out the PG where Inactive=0. This might help.
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Piling on here…
Check your Product Groups using the Product Group program… see if there are GL Control codes attached. If so, then COS values are directed by them, and stopping its use (unless other Product Groups have the same GL Control) means that GL account won’t be involved in these transactions. If not, then they are not serving a Financial purpose.
Once a Product Group is involved in a transaction, it can’t be deleted. There is an Idea floating around to add an Inactive flag (Log In - Epicor Identity), which would be really useful.
I wasn’t sure about that one… but it occurs a lot in the system. Wasn’t sure if they were forever linked, or potentially just referenced in old transactions. So yeah, unless we get an inactive flag (or create our own per @itsme’s method)… they’re always going to be there muddying the waters in your dropdown selections.
The technical term for this is database referential integrity. Since this value can determine additional functionality, its value in the transaction record cannot be removed… so to delete the underlying reference would create a “hole” in the record.
Bad things happen.
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Oh I 100% agree with that! My legacy system allowed for deletion of data.
Every time I saw “record does not exist” in that system as a result I wanted to 
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