When I imported my past invoices from Pancake to Invoice Ninja, I ended up with ~200 “Products”.
Do I need them? Can I delete them without affecting previous invoices? I’d like to effectively start over with Products and use them as Categories, but I’m worried deleting them all will break my historic invoices.
Anyone have any insight here?
From just taking a quick glance around my db and making an educated guess, I’m gonna say “it depends.”
If you’ve unchecked “Auto-update products” in your settings prior to inputting invoices, you should be okay. Invoice details are stored in one table, while the items for the invoice are stored in another (which is then referenced to its parent invoice). So it appears that every invoice is storing a custom list of items specific to that particular invoice.
However, the invoice_items table does contain a product_id column. All of mine are null pointers, likely because I don’t let changing the information with each invoice affect the master product list. But my guess is that if that box is checked, then you will have pointers to the products table, which may cause problems. That’s just a guess though, as I’ve never tested it.
As always, the usual “your mileage may vary” disclaimer applies. I’m just taking a shot in the dark.