Cannot delete account in MLS

[psnarula]

User accounts in my ward are named after the calling -- "bishop", "clerk", "RS secretary", and so forth. I want to get away from this so I used the clerk account (I am the ward clerk) to create an account for myself based on my name. When I went to delete the "clerk" account, I got this error:

The user "clerk" is referenced in one of the database records and cannot be deleted. For now, "clerk" is flagged as inactive.

What's this all about? How do I delete the clerk account?

[kd7mha]

User accounts in my ward are named after the calling -- "bishop", "clerk", "RS secretary", and so forth. I want to get away from this so I used the clerk account (I am the ward clerk) to create an account for myself based on my name. When I went to delete the "clerk" account, I got this error:

The user "clerk" is referenced in one of the database records and cannot be deleted. For now, "clerk" is flagged as inactive.

What's this all about? How do I delete the clerk account?

you can't delete accounts that are connected to transactions
see the wiki article https://tech.lds.org/wiki/index.php/MLS_users

[aebrown]

User accounts in my ward are named after the calling -- "bishop", "clerk", "RS secretary", and so forth. I want to get away from this so I used the clerk account (I am the ward clerk) to create an account for myself based on my name. When I went to delete the "clerk" account, I got this error:

The user "clerk" is referenced in one of the database records and cannot be deleted. For now, "clerk" is flagged as inactive.

What's this all about? How do I delete the clerk account?

You're doing a good thing, but there is a much simpler way.

Assuming you have already connected all these accounts to the right people, a simpler approach would be to rename each account. For example, if you are connected to the "clerk" account, rename it to be "<your name>"; rename "bishop" to be "Edward Partridge" (if your bishop's name is Edward Partridge), etc. That should have the minimum impact.

To rename an account, just click on the blue link for the user name, and then change the user name in the dialog that comes up.

The way that you were starting to do it, you would have to:

• Recreate all the accounts
• Set the correct permissions
• Connect each to the right person
• Set new passwords
• Deactivate all the old accounts

[mkmurray]

Assuming you have already connected all these accounts to the right people, a simpler approach would be to rename each account.

Would that have adverse effects on historical financial transactions? Like "Edward Partridge" being associated with every financial transaction that "clerk" ever did? Obviously "clerk" is not any better for tracking purposes, but the change to the user's name could be more misleading for historical records.

[aebrown]

Would that have adverse effects on historical financial transactions? Like "Edward Partridge" being associated with every financial transaction that "clerk" ever did? Obviously "clerk" is not any better for tracking purposes, but the change to the user's name could be more misleading for historical records.

For those people who have been serving in their callings for three years (the US financial retention period), renaming the accounts is much better than any other option, because it will associate the proper person with the transaction.

If they've been serving less than that, I still think it's better than any other option, because the transactions they have been responsible for will be associated with their user name. Only transactions made before they began serving would possibly be misleading, and that becomes less and less of an issue as time goes by.

This really isn't much of an issue because most things get frozen at the time they are done -- the batch deposit report, for example, gets printed at the time the batch is closed and rarely gets revisited in any way that anyone would see the associated user.

When was the last time you checked to see who was associated with a transaction in MLS? The answer is certainly "never" for almost every user of MLS. Even auditors only check the last 6 months, and they are working off paper for these kinds of issues.