We need to keep old items (customers, patients, products etc) in the system, but we want to be able to ignore these most of the time.

For example, if a given product is no longer used, we can't just delete it, because there will be other references to this product recording its use. In fact, a good working rule is 'NEVER DELETE ANYTHING'. Essentially the only time you should be deleting things is immediately after you created them and you made an error creating them. [A good example is creating a new product with the wrong type, ie you set it as merchandise rather than medication. You can't change the type, so you have to delete and re-create the product.]

To suppress unwanted items you deactivate them by un-ticking their 'Active' checkbox.

If you need to find deactivated items, just set the 'Active' pull-down to 'No' or 'Both' on the search screen.