# Prophet 21 Data Cleanup Checklist > Source: https://netray.co/tools/p21-data-cleanup-checklist > Publisher: Netray (netray.co), AI and integration engineering for ERP and manufacturing systems. > Section: Free Tools ## Short answer A checklist for cleaning item, customer, vendor, pricing and inventory data in Prophet 21 before an upgrade, migration or reporting project. ## Category epicor ## Erp Epicor Prophet 21 ## Industry Wholesale Distribution ## Audience - P21 administrator - Data steward - Controller ## Tool **Kind:** checklist **Scoring Note:** Critical items affect money, compliance or integrations. Fix those first. Keep a log of every mass change, and test bulk updates in a test copy before touching production. **Groups:** #### 1. Item master **Items:** **Text:** Identify items with no sales, purchases or inventory movement in a defined period, such as 24 months **Critical:** true Mark obsolete items inactive instead of deleting, preserving history **Text:** Find duplicate items with the same manufacturer part number or UPC **Critical:** true **Text:** Check for missing or inconsistent units of measure and conversion factors **Critical:** true Verify product group, class and commodity assignments are populated Review items with zero cost, zero price or negative margin Check descriptions for typos and consistent naming conventions #### 2. Customers and ship-tos **Items:** **Text:** Find duplicate customer accounts by name, address, phone and tax ID **Critical:** true Inactivate customers with no orders in a defined period and no open balance **Text:** Validate tax status, exemption certificates and expiry dates **Critical:** true Check credit limits, terms and credit holds against current policy Verify ship-to addresses, including postal codes and delivery routes Confirm customer class and salesperson assignments are current Remove or merge contacts with bounced or missing email addresses #### 3. Vendors and purchasing **Items:** **Text:** Find duplicate vendors and vendors sharing the same bank account or tax ID **Critical:** true Inactivate vendors with no activity and no open balance **Text:** Check payment terms, remit-to addresses and 1099 or tax reporting flags **Critical:** true Review vendor lead times against actual receipt history Verify item to vendor cross references and buy multiples Clear stale open purchase orders and lines #### 4. Pricing and costs **Items:** **Text:** List price rules that have expired, overlap or are never used **Critical:** true **Text:** Check for rules that produce below-cost or negative margin prices **Critical:** true Verify cost basis consistency across product groups Retire single-customer rules that duplicate a class rule Confirm contract prices have owners and end dates #### 5. Inventory and open documents **Items:** **Text:** Investigate negative on-hand quantities and fix their causes **Critical:** true Clear stale open sales orders, quotes and back orders Resolve unposted receipts, returns and transfers in transit Review bin and location records for orphan or unused locations Check replenishment parameters for items that never reorder or never stop **Text:** Reconcile inventory valuation to the general ledger **Critical:** true #### 6. Governance **Items:** **Text:** Assign a data owner for items, customers, vendors and pricing **Critical:** true Write naming and creation standards so the mess does not return Restrict who can create or change master records Schedule recurring data quality reports and review them monthly Take a backup before any bulk change and keep a change log ## Content **Intro:** Years of daily use leave any distribution ERP with duplicate customers, dead items, bad units of measure and forgotten price rules. Cleaning them before an upgrade, migration or reporting project saves you from carrying the mess forward. This checklist covers the data domains that matter most. **Sections:** #### How to use the checklist **Body:** Work through each master data area, ticking items as you complete them. Start with the critical items because they affect money, tax or integrations. Define your thresholds up front, such as how long without activity makes an item or customer inactive. Run each check as a query or report against a test copy, review the results with the business owner, and only then make changes in production. Export the completed list as evidence for your project file. #### Inactivate, do not delete **Body:** Deleting records usually breaks history and may not even be allowed once transactions exist. Marking items, customers and vendors inactive removes them from daily screens and lookups while keeping history intact for reporting and audit. Merging duplicates is different: it typically needs a controlled process, a backup, and a clear survivor record. Always keep a cross reference of the old and new identifiers so you can trace past documents. #### Data that hurts most **Body:** Not all dirty data costs the same. Wrong units of measure and conversion factors misstate inventory and cost. Missing or expired tax exemption certificates create compliance exposure. Duplicate vendors with the same bank details can lead to duplicate payments. Overlapping price rules cause quotes that differ depending on who enters them. Prioritize those before cosmetic fixes like description typos. **Bullets:** - Units of measure and conversions - Tax and exemption data - Duplicate vendors and bank details - Overlapping or expired price rules - Negative on-hand quantities #### Common mistakes **Body:** Running mass updates directly in production without a backup is the riskiest. Cleaning once and never again guarantees the problem returns, so put governance in place. Another mistake is cleaning without the business: only the salespeople know which customers are truly dead, and only buyers know which items are seasonal. Finally, do not forget downstream systems, since a fixed item number may still be wrong in your ecommerce or EDI mappings. **Cta:** If you want duplicate and stale record candidates found automatically in your ERP data, we can build a read-only analysis that produces a review list for your data owners. **Faq:** #### How do I decide an item is obsolete? **Answer:** Set a period with the business, such as 18 to 24 months with no sales, purchases or movement, and exclude seasonal and service parts. Flag candidates, have buyers review them, and inactivate rather than delete to preserve history. #### Can I merge duplicate customers? **Answer:** Often, but the process depends on your system and how much history exists. Plan it carefully, take a backup, choose a surviving record, move or reference open documents, and test in a copy first. #### How often should I clean data? **Answer:** Run light data quality checks monthly and a deeper review annually or before major projects. Governance, such as creation standards and restricted access, matters more than one-off cleanups. #### Why clean before an upgrade? **Answer:** Bad data slows testing, creates confusing results, and is expensive to move. Cleaning first reduces what you must test and migrate, and makes problems that remain easier to spot. ## Search terms prophet 21 data cleanup, p21 data cleansing checklist, erp master data cleanup checklist, duplicate customer cleanup erp, item master cleanup distribution, p21 inactive items, distributor data quality, erp data migration cleanup --- Talk to an engineer: https://netray.co/contact?intent=erp_ai | Machine catalog: https://netray.co/agent/catalog.json