Data tables can become extremely large, especially toward the end of the year. It’s possible to fill your hard drive to the point where processing becomes very slow, or even impossible. Having an excessive amount of history information can also slow the processing of history reports due to the amount of data the system must sort.

The purpose of purging is to remove transaction detail that is no longer needed from the hard drive. By purging some information, you can often recover significant amounts of hard drive space. You can create distinct companies in the software to store historical data, so that you can easily access the information. For more information on copying organizations, see Copying an Organization.