How to delete multiple transactions in Sage 50 Accounts

What Sage 50 Accounts lets you delete

Rows one, three and four: Sage's help articles, listed at the foot of this page. Row two: a verified answer in the Sage Community Hub thread on deleting multiple customer invoices. All read on 14 November 2026.

Transactions Sage will not delete

Sage's article "Why you can't delete or amend a transaction" lists the cases. Find out which ones apply before you plan the job, because they change the work from deleting to reversing.

• VAT reconciled transactions cannot be deleted. You reverse them to cancel their effect.
• Journals that the system created or imported are reversed, not deleted.
• Write-off transactions carry the reference BADDBT. Sage's route is to edit the transaction, remove the reference, save, and then delete it.
• Postponed accounting transactions cannot be edited or deleted.
• Invoices with a GoCardless payment request cannot be deleted. Sage says to post a batch credit and allocate it to the invoice.

Clear Audit Trail: removing old transactions in one go

Clear Audit Trail is the only built-in routine that removes many posted transactions at once. It is a housekeeping routine for old years. You cannot use it to pick out last month's wrong import.

Sage removes every transaction that meets all of these:

• dated on or before the date you enter;
• dated before your current financial year (in v34.0 or above, before your current and previous financial year);
• fully paid, with any transactions allocated to it also meeting the criteria;
• VAT reconciled, bank reconciled and CIS reconciled, where those apply.

Sage's steps:

1. Take an archive of your company data, so that you can view the removed transactions later.
2. On the computer that holds your data, select Tools, then Period End, then Clear Audit Trail.
3. Enter the date you want to clear transactions up to and press Clear audit trail.
4. Back up your data.
5. Check your data when the software prompts you.
6. Press OK, then Close and Close to view the removed transactions.

Afterwards an opening balance journal stands in for the removed transactions on your nominal codes, and the removed transactions can be viewed on the Audit Trail Historic reports. Sage warns that the routine affects retrospective reports that use transactional data, so run any report you need before you start.

Deleting many invoices, credits, quotations or orders

The lists in Invoices and credits, Quotations, Sales orders and Purchase orders let you select more than one record. Sales orders and Purchase orders are in Sage 50 Accounts Professional only, and only quotations with the status Lost can be deleted from the Quotations list.

1. Open the module, for example Invoices and credits.
2. Select the items you want to remove. With the default Windows selection style, hold Shift to select a continuous block or Ctrl to pick single records. To select everything before a date, Sage suggests using the search option to show those records and then Swap.
3. Press Delete, then Yes.

Sage's note on that article matters: "Removing unwanted sales invoices and credits doesn't remove any related audit trail transactions." The invoice records go, and what they posted to the ledgers stays. A Sage UKI staff member gave the same route in March 2026 to a user with close to 40,000 sales invoices, and pointed out that you compress the data afterwards to free the space. Another verified answer suggests working in small batches, because the delete can be slow with a lot of invoices.

Before you delete anything

• Back up first. Take a backup of the company before a clean-up and keep it until the accounts have been checked. For Clear Audit Trail, Sage tells you to take an archive as well.
• Write the rule down. "Every transaction from the import on 3 March" can be checked by someone else. "The ones that look wrong" cannot.
• Check the VAT position. A VAT reconciled transaction is reversed, not deleted.
• Check the bank. Sage asks for a second confirmation before it deletes a bank reconciled transaction, and anything you re-enter has to be reconciled again.

Which route fits

• A handful of wrong transactions: delete them one by one in Transactions.
• Old years you no longer need on the live audit trail: archive, then Clear Audit Trail.
• Thousands of old invoice or order records slowing the lists down: select and delete them in their own module, then compress the data.
• Hundreds of recent transactions from a bad import: if you still have the backup from before the import, restoring it is one step, but it also removes everything entered since. Otherwise it is one transaction at a time.

Would you want this clean-up done for you?

We do not sell a tool or a service for this today and are not promising one. We are deciding whether to offer it: you give the rule, you get the exact list to approve, and nothing is deleted until you say so. Your answer decides it. Tell us the size of your job and leave your e-mail address, and we will write once.