What happens when you click delete on a Submission
Submissions don't expose a customer-facing delete in the normal UI. Once a Submission has consumed any Data Credits (property data, dec page, MVR), hard delete is blocked entirely. Archive is the customer path. For genuine deletion needs, contact support.
In short: Delete is essentially staff-only and is blocked once any Data Credits have been used on the Submission. Archive is the right tool 99% of the time. For real deletion needs, contact support.
Why delete is restricted
Submissions accumulate consequences as they age:
- They consume Data Credits when integrations pull property data, dec pages, MVRs, or other paid lookups.
- Those Data Credit purchases are billing records — they can’t be silently destroyed.
- Once that link exists, hard-deleting the Submission would orphan or break the billing trail.
To preserve a clean trail, SALT blocks delete entirely on Submissions that have used Data Credits. The error you see is doing exactly what it should.
What “delete” looks like in the UI
In the standard customer-facing UI, the action you’ll see is archive, not delete. There’s no delete button in the normal Submission detail flow. If you find one (e.g. via a staff or admin path) and it’s blocked, that’s the Data Credit constraint.
When you actually need to delete
Real deletion needs are narrow:
- A privacy request from a consumer (right-to-be-forgotten, regulatory)
- A wholly mistaken Submission (e.g. test data accidentally captured in production)
- A bot/spam Submission that slipped past the spam filter
For any of these, contact support. SALT staff can perform a true delete with the appropriate audit logging — and can explain what happens to associated Data Credit records.
Archive does the same job most of the time
When a customer says “I want this gone,” they almost always mean “I want this out of my list.” Archive does that:
- The Submission disappears from the default list view.
- It can be filtered in if needed for review or compliance.
- The data is preserved.
- It’s reversible.
See Archiving vs deleting Submissions.
Common questions
I tried to delete and got a vague error. What should I tell the customer/teammate? Tell them archive does what they want. Open the Submission, archive it, and it’s out of the active list. If the customer is making a privacy/regulatory request, escalate to support.
Will archive prevent the consumer from being contacted? Archive doesn’t change consumer-side behavior. It only affects what you see in the active list.
Can support delete a Submission that has Data Credits? Yes — staff have processes that handle the billing reconciliation correctly. Customer-facing delete intentionally doesn’t.
Why was this designed this way instead of just refunding the credits and deleting? The audit trail matters more than the UX shortcut. Billing records have to stay consistent, and a customer-clickable “destroy and refund” button creates ambiguity in records that compliance can’t tolerate.