Archiving & deleting

There are two ways to remove a contact from your working list. They are not interchangeable.

	Archive	Delete
Contact appears in lists and reports	No	No
Giving history preserved	Yes	No
Historical totals stay accurate	Yes	No
Reversible	Yes, instantly	Only via restore, and not indefinitely
Use when	Someone’s no longer active	The record shouldn’t exist

Archive is almost always the right answer.

Archiving a contact

Open the contact, click Edit, and set Status to Archive. Save.

To archive several at once, tick them in the contacts list and use With Selected… → Change status → Archive.

The contact disappears from the contacts list, from quick search, and from reports — but every gift, pledge, and interaction stays attached, and your year-over-year totals stay correct.

Finding archived contacts

Open Archived Contacts from the Reports page, or run an advanced search with Contact Status is Archive.

Un-archiving

Open the archived contact, click Edit, and set the status back to whatever it should be. That’s it.

Deleting a contact

Open the contact and use the delete option on the edit page.

Deleting removes the contact from your account along with their gifts, pledges, tasks, and interactions.

Deleting distorts your history

Every gift that contact ever gave leaves your totals with them. Last year’s fundraising figure changes retroactively, and reports that compare years stop matching what you reported at the time. This is the single most common regret people have with their Karani data.

Delete only for records that shouldn’t exist at all — a test contact, a duplicate you can’t merge, someone entered into the wrong account.

Restoring a deleted contact

Deleted contacts are soft-deleted for a period, so a mistaken deletion can often be reversed. Contact support@karani.co as soon as you notice — the sooner you ask, the more likely it is recoverable.

Which one do I want?

• They died, moved on, or stopped supporting you → Archive.
• They asked to be removed from your mailing → Keep the contact; remove them from the relevant groups and tag them so nobody re-adds them.
• They asked you to erase their data → Delete, and tell support if you need it purged rather than soft-deleted.
• It’s a duplicate → Merge, don’t delete. Merging keeps both records’ giving history.
• It’s test data from setting up your account → Delete.

Deleting everything

If you want to start over, Settings → Data has options to reset contacts, reset gifts, or reset the whole account. Those are irreversible bulk operations — download your data first.