Anonymise customer, supplier, or employee data in QuickBooks

Under GDPR, individuals have the right to be forgotten. If your customer, supplier, or employee wants to be deleted from your QuickBooks, there are a couple of things to consider:

• You may have legal or business reasons to retain some or all of your records. You should consider consulting an expert to determine what records should be retained or what should be deleted.
• If you still think that deletion is the right decision for your business, we have instructions on how to manually overwrite data in your QuickBooks account.

Note: The QuickBooks Audit Log may retain trace amounts of personal information stored in log files and logging data. The audit log is not editable in case it’s needed for audit purposes.

For QuickBooks Online

Customers

1. Go to Sales and select Customers (Take me there).
2. Select the desired customer.
3. To change the customer's info, select Edit at the top.
4. Replace their name with a unique name (e.g. DeletedCustomer1, DeletedCustomer2, etc.). We do not recommend merging anonymous customers together. Delete or replace their personal information (e.g. Phone, Mobile, Address Details etc.) with anything you want.
5. Select Save.

Suppliers

1. Go to Expenses and select Suppliers (Take me there).
2. Select the desired supplier.
3. To change their info, select Edit at the top.
4. Replace their name with a unique name (e.g. DeletedSupplier1, DeletedSupplier2, etc.). We do not recommend merging anonymous suppliers together. Delete or replace their information (e.g. Phone, Mobile, Address Details etc.) with anything you want.
5. Select Save.

Employees

1. Go to Employees and select the desired employee.
2. Select Edit, in the Action column.
3. From the Employee Information page, replace their name with a unique name (e.g. DeletedEmployee1, DeletedEmployee2, etc.) Delete or replace their information (e.g. Phone, Mobile, Address Details etc.) with anything you want.
4. Select Save.

Limitations:

• Pay slips and Leaver and Year-End Forms will remain for this employee and cannot be removed or anonymised.
• Some historical data will not be available to anonymise, for instance historical absences, pay history for prior years, older tax information.
• RTI Submissions and Pension reports will continue to include data for these employees.

As an employer, you may have an obligation to keep these records and the limitations may not be a problem.

Please note that original details might still be available in Audit Trail if there are any old transactions for the customer/supplier/employee.