Archives: how FeePrime forgets nothing

You’ll need: nothing switched on — this lesson is orientation and applies to every FeePrime business.

There is no delete button in FeePrime, and that is on purpose. Records you no longer want are archived: taken out of everyday sight while remaining findable, readable and reversible.

Archive is not delete

  ARCHIVE                      DELETE (does not exist here)
  ------------------------     ------------------------------
  leaves every normal list     would leave every list
  stays in the Archived tab    would be gone
  keeps its full history       would take its history with it
  can be restored              could not be undone
  still linked to old          would orphan old invoices,
  documents correctly           orders and reports

That last row is the one that matters most. A supplier from three years ago is still attached to the bills you paid them. Destroy the supplier and those bills lose the thing they refer to, and your historic accounts stop making sense. Archiving keeps the past intact while clearing the present.

Doing it

On a record you will find Archive, which asks you to confirm before it acts.

The record then leaves the normal list and appears under the Archived tab, which has the same search and pagination as the main list. Open it and FeePrime states plainly that This record is archived, so nobody mistakes it for a live one. It still has its own history.

To bring it back, use Restore, which also asks for confirmation.

If a module has nothing archived, the tab says No archived items rather than showing you an empty screen with no explanation. And remember from an earlier lesson: a few non-standard lists have no Archived tab at all.

The mistake to avoid

The genuinely damaging habit is renaming an unwanted record and reusing it for something else — turning an old supplier into a new one by typing over the name.

It looks tidy and it corrupts your history. Every bill, order and report that pointed at the old supplier now silently points at the new one. Reports for last year change retrospectively, and nothing about the screen warns anyone. Archive the old record and create a new one; the two seconds you save are not worth the year of accounts you damage.

Try it

On staging.feeprime.com, archive a contact, confirm it has left the main list, find it under Archived, open it and read the archived notice, then restore it. Doing the full loop once removes the fear that archiving is destructive, which is what makes people avoid it and clutter their lists instead.