Anonymizing Customer and Vendor personal data in Sage 300

Some jurisdictions have laws that affect the use of personal data. Under those laws, customers and vendors from those locations can ask you to "anonymize" their data.

Laws about the use of personal data include:

• The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) affects people living in the European Union
• The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) affects people living in California

These laws apply to personal (customer and vendor) data no matter where a company holds or processes it. Therefore, companies based in other locations must still anonymize the data of people who live in those jurisdictions.

Personal data in Sage 300

In these laws, personal data means data that others can use to identify a specific person, including their name, phone numbers, and addresses (both email and physical). Sage 300 commonly stores this kind of data. 

When a customer or vendor asks us to comply with the law, we can remove their personal data from Sage 300 by anonymizing it. 

Important: Anonymizing personal data is not the only thing we need to do to comply. To determine other requirements, and to learn more about the legislation, see:

• GDPR https://www.eugdpr.org
• CCPA https://oag.ca.gov/privacy/ccpa

Sage 300’s Anonymizer helps you remove a customer or vendor’s personal data. It replaces the customer or vendor’s personal data with text that you specify.

Important: After you use the Anonymizer to replace personal data, you cannot recover the original data. There is no record of the original data, or which customers or vendors have been anonymized.

The Anonymizer does not update personal data for employees in Project and Job Costing. Update these records manually. 

Prepare to anonymize

1. Ask all users to sign out of Sage 300.
2. Back up your data.
3. Select the applicable version:
   - Sage 300 2023: Download the Anonymizer version 2023. It works with all versions of Sage 300 2023.
   - Sage 300 2024: Download the Anonymizer version 2024. It works with all versions of Sage 300 2024.
   - Sage 300 2025: Download the Anonymizer version 2025. It works with all versions of Sage 300 2025.  
4. Double-click the .ZIP file.

Anonymize data

1. Run Sage300Anonymizer.exe.
2. Choose whether to anonymize customers or vendors.
3. Enter the customer number or vendor number as appropriate.
4. In the Replace personal data with field, enter 1-6 characters. Sage 300 will replace all instances of the customer or vendor’s personal data with the contents of this field.
5. Click Anonymize.

The Anonymizer changes personal data (in your company) as follows: 

• Replaces data in certain standard fields (that typically contain personal data) with the contents of Replace personal data with
• Replaces data in optional fields. 
  Note: The replacement content varies depending on the type of field. 
• Data in text fields becomes the contents of the Replace personal data with field
• Data in amount fields becomes zero
• Data in date and time fields becomes the current date/time

Check the results

1. Review all fields related to the customer or vendor, to confirm that no personal data remains.
2. If you have Sage CRM integrated with Sage 300, anonymize the same data in Sage CRM also. Do this right away to prevent Sage CRM putting its (pre-anonymized) version of the data back into your company file. 
3. If you use Sales Analysis, use the Sales Analysis help and follow the steps in these articles:
   1. Clear Details
   2. Reset Sales Analysis Data
   3. Retrieve Details
4. If you don't use General Ledger, 300 creates .CSV files for GL transactions. Some of these may also contain personal data. Anonymizer does not affect these files, so remove personal data from these manually.
5. The Sage300AnonymizerAudit.log lists dates and times when you have run Sage 300 Anonymizer. You can find this in the folders Shared Data, then Company.