Best practices for archiving inactive users without losing history?

[partomas]

I'm curious how others manage old and inactive user accounts in EspoCRM, especially in systems that have been running for many years.

Over time, we've accumulated hundreds of unused Portal Users and quite a few system/integration accounts. They are mixed with active users, which makes user lists and selection fields unnecessarily cluttered.

Simply deleting these accounts doesn't seem like a good solution, as we want to preserve historical references — who created, modified, or was responsible for certain records.

How do you handle this in your EspoCRM installations?

• Do you simply disable inactive accounts or delete them?
• Is there a way to archive users so they disappear from everyday lists and selection fields but remain linked to historical records?
• Does EspoCRM already have a built-in feature or recommended approach for this?
• How do you handle old system/API accounts that are no longer used?

Ideally, I'd like to keep our active user lists clean without sacrificing data integrity or historical traceability.

I'd be interested to hear how others have solved this, especially in larger, long-running installations.

Thanks!

[eymen-elkum]

You don’t need to delete the accounts to clean up the lists. In EspoCRM 10.1, the Users list has an Active filter and the Portal Users list has a Portal Active filter, but neither is selected by default. Standard user pickers are configured separately and already default to active users.

To make the Portal Users list open with Portal Active selected, add or merge this into custom/Espo/Custom/Resources/metadata/clientDefs/PortalUser.json:

{
    "defaultFilterData": {
        "primary": "activePortal"
    }
}

For the regular Users list, use User.json in the same directory and set "primary" to "active".

Clear the EspoCRM cache and reload. If the list still opens with an old filter, reset its search or test in a fresh browser session: a previously stored filter can take precedence over the default.

This only changes what the list shows initially. You can still switch to All when you need to find an inactive account, and no records or historical links are changed.