Deleting custom object records in bulk

Plan requirement

Subscription Suite Growth or higher, Support Professional or higher
Access Admin

Records can be removed in bulk, which breaks every ticket pointing at them. Usually the wrong tool.

Delete in bulk

  1. Open the object's records page.
  2. Select the records, or filter to them.
  3. Delete.

What it does to your tickets

Tickets pointing at a deleted record lose the reference. The ticket survives; the context does not. Reading such a ticket next year, nobody can tell which contract it was about.

That is not tidying. It is removing the reason the object existed.

Use a status instead

Give the object a status field: active, ended, retired. Mark records rather than deleting them, and filter the lookup field to active ones so agents only pick from current records.

Everything stays readable and nothing breaks. This is worth designing in at the start, because retrofitting it means editing every record.

When deleting is right

  • A bad import. Remove it and do it again properly, before anything points at it.
  • Test data.
  • A genuine obligation to erase. Personal data under a retention rule or a data subject request.

All three share a feature: nothing meaningful references the records, or you are required to remove them regardless.

Export before any bulk delete. There is no undo, and a file costs nothing.

See also

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