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Answered
Do changes to categories etc. affect historical data?
Andrew Fearnley
asked this on July 25, 2011 07:39 pm
I am looking at upgrading to SM 8 or 9 from 3.2.3 and in doing so I would like to streamline things. In the past, any changes to Categories, Rates, Taxes and D/C types seemed to have affected historical data. With the new version(s) does this still occur, and if so, does it also affect historical data of non-live or archived items. If no to the latter, do those items become affected once they are unarchived or made live again? (I have needed to do this from time to time for reference)
Thanks
Comments
Rates, categories, currencies, and d/c types are all saved when you modify the item, and changing the actual categories themselves will not modify any historical data.
Changing a tax percentage will always update all items associated with the tax so that invoices and reports display the proper calculation based on the tax's displayed percentage. If your tax percentage changes, you can easily get around this by making a new tax type for the new rate to ensure your old data remains intact, and that there is a way to differentiate between the old and the new tax types.
Thanks for the quick response. I have been doing the taxes as you suggested over the last few years, as Canada has changed the GST several times, and some of the Provinces have restructured their tax as well. As a result I've got about 8 different tax rates.
I did some testing to see what would happen regarding Categories, etc. I created a test category, description and tax and and applied a new Debt/Credit to an old (live) project. I then made the project non-live and changed or deleted the three variables in different scenarios. Making the project live again, the following behaviour is noted. (This info may benefit others)
1. If a tax is deleted, the restored D/C will have no tax applied. If the tax name or percentage is changed but not deleted, the D/C will inherit the change.
2. If a category is deleted, the D/C will default to the first category as listed in preferences, but the hourly (an I suppose fixed) rate will remain as it was when the D/C was created. If a category name or rate is changed but not deleted, the D/C's type name will inherit the change, but the rate is unaffected.
3. The D/C's description will remain the same regardless, but if it had been deleted in the Description list, that list will be repopulated with that description once the D/C is restored.
I see how the above all makes sense, but in 2, it could be problematic, especially since I'd like to delete some Categories and really streamline things. As a follow-up question, do you advise in this case to start fresh with the new version? I could just do an HTML report of all past projects. If I buy an upgrade (from 3.2.3) does that version have to be on the Mac for verification? It's currently on my PowerMac G5, but I want to use v.8 or 9 on my Intel iMac.
Thanks
Hi Andrew,
Thanks for the followup. We're looking into the ability to merge debt/credit types for future releases so that, if you'd like to remove a type, you can instead merge the type into another type and easily remove it in a more organized fashion. We hope to get this into Studiometry 9.0.
If you'd like to upgrade from 3.x please open a Support ticket with us here and we'll send over information about how to upgrade.
Hope this helps!
Excellent, thank you!