Archiving (suspending) Items and Product Lines

We often get questions like;

"So, how do you remove items when you're done?"

"What happens when you get rid of your products after their rental life?"

The first thing we say is if you're in the middle of your season, it's probably better to simply change the status of items to a post-operational stage such as Sold, Stolen, or Transferred, see Inventory lifecycle.

However, before you start your next season you will probably want to have a good clear out so your old inventory is not getting in the way.

Archive, don't delete

It is important to note that we don't completely delete your Item, but instead, we archive it.

Any historical reservations that contain the bike will still know what bike it was, rather than showing a blank.

To do this, find any bikes you no longer have and press the Archive item button on the item row, then confirm.

Remember, we archive bikes (rather than deleting them) precisely to maintain:

1. reservation history of that bike
2. service history of that bike
3. customer rental history for a bike

Archiving frees up your plan's item capacity

Every BRM plan includes a maximum number of items. Archiving an item releases its share of that allowance straight away, so archiving is what you want whenever you need to make room for new stock.

This is worth knowing before you reach for Hard Delete: deleting an item does not free up any more capacity than archiving already has. If your reason for deleting is to make space, archiving achieves exactly the same thing with none of the risk.

There is more detail, including the order to do things in, in I've reached my item limit — how do I add more items?

Hard Delete

In some cases however you do want to really delete an item. This feature is available to users with the admin or operations privilege. It requires a double confirmation, typing "confirm" to continue. We call this Hard Delete.

Please treat it as a last resort:

• It cannot be undone. The item and everything identifying it — its reference, barcode, brand, size — are gone for good.
• The item's entire event history is permanently destroyed along with it.
• The warning you see about existing bookings only covers upcoming ones. It does not check past bookings, so an item with years of history behind it can still be deleted without any extra warning.
• It frees no more plan capacity than archiving does (see above).

If you believe you genuinely need an item permanently removed — for example it was created in error and has never been used — please contact support first and we'll check it over with you before anything irreversible happens.

Impact analysis

We recommend that you remove all items in a Product Line before removing the Product Line and remove all Product Lines from a Product Family before removing that, and so on for Categories.

For safety reasons (avoiding costly mistaken archiving) we assess the impact of any archives before we carry them out. That is why you have to confirm before removing parents when they have children. E.g. a Product Line with active Items;

You can find archived bikes in your inventory by using the 'also include' filters at the top of your two inventory pages — the Show Archived toggle on Inventory, and the Archived filter on item search:

Inventory - Add / Manage Items

Inventory - Search

See Also

Item status (inventory lifecycle)

I've reached my item limit — how do I add more items?