Deleting Old user

[Community Alums]

I have a question, I would like to know if there are any ramifications to deleting old user accounts for people that are no longer with the company.  We service clients out of our system so we have employees and non-employees in the system.  I am wondering if there would be any issues deleting the user accounts.  I could write a script that is looking for Active = False and company = '<company name>'

Does anyone know proper deactivated account etiquette or inactive user cleanup?

[Allen Andreas]

Hi,

You should never really delete anything, but consider setting it to inactive.

Deleting the record causes issues with other records where the data was referenced as you break the link.

Here's my same reply 4 years ago regarding this topic: https://community.servicenow.com/community?id=community_question&sys_id=8fcd8219dbaa9740fff8a345ca96...

Please mark reply as Helpful/Correct, if applicable. Thanks!

[Community Alums]

Agreed, I will leave the files.  But I think I will remove them from any groups so it cleans them up so we don't have a ton of users in a group that are not active. Would that be ok?

[Jaspal Singh]

Yes, that is how it is supposed to be.

Once user is marked inactive you need to remove all Groups & Roles (if associated directy without groups) associated & that will have to be physical deletion.

As a practice you can submit a formal ticket in ServiceNow to keep a track of it in future & also attach excel backup for reference to the ticket. We have the option to check it in Deleted records but it has loads of data & may time to load so for ease better would be to refer an excel & then associate required group again.

[Allen Andreas]

Hi @Stephen C 

Glad you've decided to leave the records. I agree that they should be removed from groups (that's actually a best practice and could be a "finding" on a ServiceNow HealthScan if inactive users are still a member of a group), so good on you for removing them as well.

Please mark my above reply as Helpful & Correct, if applicable. Thanks!