Preventing a Record From Being Used

An item is withdrawn from the catalogue. A customer is blocked after a payment dispute. A warehouse closes, a cost centre is folded into another one, a supplier stops trading. The record has served its purpose and should not be used again.

Deleting it is not an option. Every document that ever named it would lose the thing it was pointing at — invoices, stock movements, entries, reports, all of it. What you want instead is to retire the record: leave it exactly where it is, keep every document that refers to it intact, and stop anyone from choosing it on anything new. That is what Prevent Usage does, and it is available on every record in the system.

Where the switch is

There is no tick box for this. You will not find "Prevent Usage" anywhere on the record's own screen, on any tab, on any entity — the only way to set it is from a More menu, and the two More menus behave differently.

On a record's own screen, More offers exactly one of the pair, chosen from where the record currently stands: Prevent Usage on a record that is still in use, Allow Usage on one that is already retired. Choosing it changes nothing on its own — it marks the record the way typing in a field would, and you still have to save. Close the screen without saving and nothing happened.

On a list screen, More offers both commands, always, at the very bottom of the menu. These work on the rows you have ticked, and they are immediate: the records are saved and processed for you, with no further confirmation and nothing to save afterwards.

	On the record's own screen	On a list screen
Which commands appear	one of the pair, depending on the record	both, always
How many records	the one you are looking at	every row you ticked
Does it save by itself	no — you must save	yes, immediately

On the record's screen, nothing happens until you save

This is the single most common way to get this wrong. Clicking Prevent Usage on an open record marks it and leaves the screen unsaved. If you then navigate away, the record is still in use and nobody was told. Save the record.

Because both commands are part of the standard set, they are on every entity in the product — master files and documents alike. See Buttons on Every Screen for the rest of what More offers.

How you can tell a record is retired

Open it and look at the chips beside the screen title, where Draft and Revised appear. A retired record carries Usage Prevented:

That chip is the only visual marker there is. Nothing distinguishes a retired record in a list — no colour, no icon, no column — so if you need to review what has been retired, filter the list on the field itself rather than looking for a marking.

What being retired actually stops

This is worth being precise about, because "prevented" sounds broader than it is.

The block is on being referenced by something else. When a document is saved, every record it names is checked, and if one of them is retired the save is refused with a message naming the record and saying its usage is prevented. That is the whole mechanism.

Three things follow from that, and all three surprise people:

Existing documents are untouched. Retiring an item does not reach back into the two thousand invoices that already name it. They keep their lines, their values and their entries, and they still print and report exactly as before. Retirement is about what happens next, not about what already happened.

The record itself stays fully editable. It is not locked, not read-only and not hidden from you. You can still open it, change its name, correct its data and save it. Retirement stops other records from pointing at it; it does not stop you from maintaining it.

The check happens when the document is saved, not while you are typing. Somebody can build a whole invoice around a retired item and only find out at the end. In practice this is rare, because retired records also disappear from most pickers — which is the next thing to understand.

Two visibility settings that behave differently

Retiring a record changes where it shows up, and the two places it can show up are governed separately — with opposite defaults. This catches people out, so it is worth stating plainly.

In reference lookups — the pickers you use to fill a field — retired records are hidden by default. This is the behaviour that makes the feature work day to day: the clerk writing the next invoice simply never sees the withdrawn item, so there is nothing to explain and no error to hit.

In list screens, retired records still appear by default. Also deliberate: the list is where you go to manage records, and a record you cannot find is a record you cannot un-retire, correct or report on.

Both can be changed, in Global Config on the Security And Login tab, in the Records Security group:

Setting	What ticking it does
Display Prevented Records In Search	Brings retired records back into reference lookups, so they can be picked again
Do Not Display Prevented Records In List View	Removes retired records from list screens as well

The same two settings exist on a security profile, where they apply to the users carrying that profile. A profile that grants either one wins over the global setting — these settings only ever loosen what the system-wide setting allows, never tighten it.

For list screens there is a third, finer level. A security profile's Standard Authorities grid has a Display Prevent Usage Records column, set per entity type, with three values: Display, Hide, and Same As Config. A row set to Display or Hide decides the matter for that one entity type; Same As Config — the value every row starts on — hands the decision back to the profile setting, and then to the global one. So you can hide retired customers from every list while leaving retired items visible, without touching anything global. See Security Profiles.

Letting some people use them anyway

Sometimes a retired record legitimately has to be named on a new document, and there are three ways to allow it — by person, and by field.

On a user record and on a security profile, in Basic Information, two settings do this:

Setting	What it allows
Allow Using Prevented Records In Insert	Naming a retired record on a document that has not been processed before
Allow Using Prevented Records In Update	Naming a retired record while editing a document that has already been processed

The split between the two is not about the field, it is about the document you are saving. A document being written for the first time is governed by the Insert setting; one that has already been processed and is being edited again is governed by the Update setting.

The reason to grant "In Update" even when you would not grant "In Insert"

Retirement is checked on every save, including saves of old documents. So an invoice written last year, naming an item that was retired last month, will refuse to save the moment somebody opens it and changes anything at all — the retired item is still on it, and the check does not care that it was already there.

If your users edit historical documents, granting Allow Using Prevented Records In Update avoids this without loosening anything about new documents.

The third way is per field rather than per person: the Allow Usage Of Prevented Records grid on the Fields and Entities Settings screen lifts the block on one named field of one named screen — the classic case being a returns document, which has to be able to name the very item that was withdrawn. That grid, and the trap of leaving its scope empty, is covered in Lifting Built-in Restrictions.

Prevent Usage As From Doc

Alongside the main pair sits a narrower one: Prevent Usage As From Doc and Allow Usage As From Doc. It appears on the record's own More menu the same way, and it exists only on documents — customers, suppliers, items, accounts and warehouses do not have it.

It blocks one specific thing: using that document as the source another document is generated from. A quotation that has already been turned into an order, or an order that has been fully delivered, can be closed off this way — it stays selectable everywhere else, it can still be opened, printed and reported on, but nobody can build anything else on top of it.

The two are independent. A document can be freely usable but closed to further generation, retired outright but still a valid source, or both, or neither.

By default this block applies when a document is processed. Global Config carries one setting that widens it — Apply Prevent Usage Of From Doc With Drafts, on the Documents And Books tab in the Documents And Drafts Behavior group — which extends the same check to drafts, so a closed-off document cannot be used as a source even on a document that is only being saved as a draft.

Where the settings live

Setting	Where
Display Prevented Records In Search · Do Not Display Prevented Records In List View	Global Config → Security And Login → Records Security, and on each security profile
Display Prevent Usage Records (per entity type)	Security profile → Standard Authorities grid
Allow Using Prevented Records In Insert / In Update	User → Basic Information, and security profile → Basic Information
Allow Usage Of Prevented Records (per field)	Fields and Entities Settings → Allow Usage Of Prevented Records
Apply Prevent Usage Of From Doc With Drafts	Global Config → Documents And Books → Documents And Drafts Behavior

Retirement is recorded like any other change to a record, so who retired something and when is visible in the audit trail.