Purging

[brinkerdana]

I'm doing some consulting for an agency that has never purged anything.  I've never gone through the process myself. 

Is there anything I should know, perhaps about the order of purge or preparations to be done before hand?

Do you have a sample of the written procedure that discusses annual purging? 

Thanks!

[Lance Bateman]

This is one area where Applied has actually done a good job of documentation in "Help"!

1. Make sure they have a "retention and destruction" policy stating how long they keep info.  (Also look at state laws, ours requires 5 years from the year of the transaction, our policy is 7 years).  Accounting may have longer retention period than other areas.
2. Possibly run some reports first, to look for:
    -old claims not closed.
    -old memos not printed
    -old transactions not cleared
3. Clean those up as possible
4. Plan some major time on weekends - everyone has to be out of system when running, and depending on size, can take a while.
5. Make sure anti-virus is turned off while running, or you'll never finish.
6. Be aware the screen display of "progress" is not always updated.  Do NOT kill the program after it starts, even if it looks like nothing's going on.
7. Biggest space hits - activity, policy history.
8. Do NOT do a pack and reindex after for a few days until sure all is going well.  Once you do P&R, Applied cannot help recover anything.
9. Purge GL History also takes care of GL Work - don't have to run both.
10. Some things won't purge, if they have a "drill-down".
11. Current policies, customer screens, contacts - no purge program from Applied.  I think Teich may have something he wrote that helps, and may be worth the cost.  Some have made suggestion of moving those (if there are no policies left within the retention period) to prospects, marking with a specific marketing plan indicating to be deleted - and deleting from prospects using that utility.

Before I run, I go through and look for policies in the "current" billing screens that expired outside of our retention period, and move them to history - before I run the purge programs.  Lots faster than manually deleting them from current policies.

Don't forget any third party program that also has info, such as imaging.  Not sure all of them have a purge program yet, though.

[brinkerdana]

Thanks, Lance.

That's exactly the stuff we need to know! 

Dana

[Kenny Cruzan]

Easier way is to break down and buy the application that Randy Teich sells to purge TAM data.  Sure makes it easy when you set a date like 10 years and it automatically goes through everything and cleans it up.
Randy has done some work for us recently including deleting old agencies we do not use and all the data that pertained to them.  He does a great job!

[brinkerdana]

Thanks, Kenny.

[Lance Bateman]

And on Randy's program - I haven't tried it, but I've been told it also has the ability to handle "segregated information" that should not be deleted due to outstand suit or claim.

[Ian Blundell]

Randy's program allows you to enter a number of clients with a "Litigation Hold" on them so these don't have anything deleted during the purge.  It also looks for open claims and doesn't delete activities or attachments linked to any open claims that would otherwise be deleted.
He is looking to add a feature that allows you to have attachments that are part of the permanent record not be deleted,  this will probably be based on specific category/subcategory codes.

[brinkerdana]

I'll let the agency I'm working with know about Randy's program.

Thanks, folks.

[Jan Regnier]

Easier way is to break down and buy the application that Randy Teich sells to purge TAM data.  Sure makes it easy when you set a date like 10 years and it automatically goes through everything and cleans it up.
Randy has done some work for us recently including deleting old agencies we do not use and all the data that pertained to them.  He does a great job!

What's it called and do you know if he has info posted to take a look at?

[Ian Blundell]

Check out www.teichdataservices.com
It is the Data Retention program that I'm referring to.  Randy just had prostrate surgery after TENCon but is doing well and answering emails again.

[Jan Regnier]

Check out www.teichdataservices.com
It is the Data Retention program that I'm referring to.  Randy just had prostrate surgery after TENCon but is doing well and answering emails again.

Thanks, Ian...