You use the purge updates to delete customer and subscription data from the QuickFill database. This will not cause your database files to get any smaller, but it will make space available for new records so that the files won't grow as fast as they would have otherwise.
When deciding whether to purge data, it helps to know where the various types of records are stored so that you can determine what space will be made available by the purge.
Customer records are stored in database file 1. Every customer has at least one subscription and/or prospect record attached. Customers who are both subscribers and prospects are not deleted until both the subscription and the prospect records are purged. Similarly, customers who subscribe to multiple publications are not deleted until all of their subscriptions are purged.
Subscription records are stored in database file 2. Entering a new order results in the creation of a subscription record—entering a renewal order does not.
Order records are also stored in database file 2. Every order you enter, new or renewal, results in the creation of an order record. After all the issues in an order have been served, it is marked as expired and is then a candidate for being purged.
Subscription history records are stored in database file 3. These contain the narrative description of every transaction that was applied to a subscription, including orders, payments, address changes, and adjustments. The subscription records are displayed on the lookup screen but are not used by any of the reports.
Prospect records are stored in database file 7. These records link a customer name to a list code. They are created when you enter a prospect name using the 'Prospects' transaction and when you convert expired subscribers to prospects using the expired subscription purge.
There are four types of purge updates:
The 'Purge expired subscriptions' update deletes subscriptions that have expired, making space available in database files 2, 3, and possibly 1. (You may not make any space in file 1 if the customers have other subscription and/or prospect records.) You have a choice of deleting the customer records for the expired subscriptions or converting them to prospects. If you convert them to prospects, you won't make any new space available in file 1 and file 7 will grow a little.
The 'Purge history orders' update deletes order records that are no longer active but does not delete subscription or customer records. In addition, it does not delete the last (or current) order in a subscription. The 'Purge history orders' update makes space available in database file 2 only.
The 'Purge subscription history' update makes space available in database file 3 only. You have the option of selecting which types of transactions you want to purge—for example, you can purge the subscription history records for address changes only.
The 'Purge prospects' update deletes prospect records and customer records, making space available in database file 7 and possibly database file 1. (You may not make any space in file 1 if the customers have other subscription and/or prospect records.)
In general, when you purge expired subscriptions or history orders, you will no longer be able to get accurate 'Payment rate' and 'Renewal rate' reports for the period being purged. If you purge all the subscriptions that expired in 2004 and then run a 'Renewal rate' report on subscriptions that expired or were renewed in 2004, your renewal rate will appear to be 100%!
In addition, when you purge expired subscriptions, the 'Adds and drops by issue' report will no longer be accurate when run for issues served during the period being purged.
For this reason you should always make an archival copy of your database before running a purge. If you ever need to run a report that involves the purged data, then you can temporarily restore the old database, run the report, and then restore the current database.
All of the purge updates can be scheduled to run overnight, which is helpful if you have a large database or if you wish to purge expired subscriptions from several publications. (Click here for details on options for running the purge updates.)