[RetailEdge Moderator]

As you get more data in your system you might want to do a few things to increase the performance of RetailEdge. Getting rid of old customers, dead inventory, etc.

RetailEdge has a number of purging utilities to help you with this and get rid of this old data that can bog your system down over time. To run these utilities choose Purge from the Tools Menu in RetailEdge and then choose the appropriate purge.

This will:

1. Reduce the file sizes making them easier to view.
2. Speed up reporting functions by reducing the amount of data that needs to be analyzed and displayed.
3. Remove old data that will not be used anymore.
4. Reduce the amount of file space required by the RetailEdge data.

This can be significant for many files. When you delete a purchase order, inventory item or customer, the data is just turned off and not actually deleted from the file. This allows RetailEdge to continue to provide report information on these customers, inventory and purchase orders even though they have been "deleted" from the system. Purging data will physically delete these turned off files so that they will no longer be contained in reports and will not take up computer disk space.

Note: Before purging you should do the following:
1. Backup your data.
2. Print all appropriate reports for the period that you are purging.

In addition to purging, you can run Optimize Tables from the Tools menu as well. After using a data table for a period of time, it can be useful to optimize the table. Optimizing a table will remove free space from a table and organize the data more efficiently. This can speed up the time it takes to view tables and run reports.