Credit Card History / Security Cleanup |
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There are several functions to clean up old credit card information. You can run any or all of them at any time, depending on what information you want to remove.
Note: This assumes you've entered credit card information in the designated fields for Guarantee Information or for Payments and Deposits. If you put credit cards in other places, such as Notes fields, then that information is not removed automatically.
The first two functions, removing swipe data and CVC (security) codes from ALL transactions, are required to be run once for any older database to meet PCI compliance. These functions sweep all of the security codes and swipe information from the entire database, but leave the other card information intact.
PCI Compliance note: Refer to the PA-DSS Implementation Guide (see the Introduction chapter) for important details about proper security procedures.
If you want to completely remove credit card information from past customers, etc. (including the card numbers, expiration dates, etc.), there are several functions that will do that. You can select which transactions or guarantee information is cleaned of card information, or you can choose the option to clean all credit card information from the entire system. Note that the options for removing "old" or "past" information won't remove it from the Guarantee information of future reservations (presumably you still need that), or from transactions of future or current reservations (since you may need to process a void, credit, or additional charge).
Finally, while it's not a strong security risk if you leave expired cards in the system, you can clean out all expired card information if you prefer. Expired cards won't be re-used by accident anyway, so this is simply a minimal clean-up operation. Keep in mind of course that this will still remove some "history", in terms of what card was used for past transactions.
Important: These functions can result in a large number of data changes, potentially causing delays if you're networked, etc., especially if you have never done these before or only do them on rare occasions. At the very least, close this dialog after each operation if it shows that more than 100 records were cleaned up, to allow things to be synchronized and log files saved.