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In this lesson we're going to take care of some housekeeping. As time goes by and we keep recording more and more things in our Company File it gets bigger. The more things we record the bigger it gets, and almost everything that we do in MYOB is saved in the file. Sales and Purchases, Activity Slips, Jobs, Bank Transactions - pretty much everything. Depending on the computer that's running the MYOB software, when the Company File gets too large things can start running slower, or backups and verifications might start taking a very long time. If this happens we can help the situation by purging unneeded information. This process quite simply deletes information from the Company File and for this reason it's very important to think carefully about which data we want to delete. For instance, information that needs to be included in our next Business Activity Statement, Reconciliation, or Tax Return should really not be deleted. We purge information from each Command Centre separately. For example, from the Purchases Command Centre we can purge Closed Bills. From the Sales Command Centre we can purge Closed Invoices, and so on. To start the process go to the File Menu and choose Purge. Here we can see Purge Closed Bills, and this will change according to the Command Centre we currently have open. Let's go to the Sales Command Centre and try it again. This time we have Purge Closed Invoices. Let's have a look at each Command Centre. Purge Journal Entries for Accounts; the Banking Command Centre doesn't have anything; we've covered Sales; under Time Billing we have Purge Activity Slips; skipping to Payroll, Purge Timesheets; Inventory also doesn't have any; and for Card File, Purge Contact Logs. Performing a full purge requires that we go through the purging process for each Command Centre. Each of these processes is very similar, though, so we only need to look at one of them. Let's go with Sales. File and Purge Closed Invoices. First up we're reminded that we should perform a Backup and we can do that right from here. Assuming that we have a current backup I'll click Continue. In the next window we choose a Cutoff Date. Everything prior to this date will be lined up for deletion. Choose a Month, and a Financial Year. Just below we choose whether we want to purge entire Invoices or just part of them. If we choose Detail Only certain information about each Invoice will be kept and we'll still be able to pull that up and view it later. I recommend that you experiment with this in your practice Company File to get a feel for what is deleted and what is kept for each type of purge. Click Continue, and the next window displays a list of all the items to be purged. After reviewing the list we can select individual items to be included in, or excluded from, the purge using the Checkmark column at the left. Once we're happy with everything click the Purge Closed Invoices button. I won't do this in my file because we need these transactions to perform our end-of-period procedures later, but it's the last step in the process and when we click it we'll return to the Command Centre. Now, once we've done a purge we should think about Optimising our Company File. Over time as we enter transactions and perform purges, the Company File will develop holes or empty areas. If you're familiar with how a hard disk drive can become fragmented over time it's a little bit like that. With a disk drive we would normally defragment it. With an MYOB Company File, though we optimize it. To do this, go to the File Menu and choose Optimize Company File. MYOB now tells us what's about to happen. The Company File that we currently have open will be renamed with the File Extension bak. A new optimised copy will be created in its place. Click OK, and the process is completed. Click OK here and the new optimised Company File is opened. And that's it. How often you perform Purging and Optimising will really depend on how much you do with your Company File from day to day. If you enter a moderate amount of transactions and performance doesn't seem to be suffering, you'll probably rarely perform these procedures. If, however, your Company File is used a lot, or things are starting to slow down, you'll probably end up being quite familiar with them. And that's it. Let's move on.