Inactive customers still in Cust Detail list

I'm unsure what you mean by Cust Detail list. If you are speaking of the Customer Balance Detail report, you can modify the report to show only balances with a paid status of 'Open' to eliminate all fully-paid invoices from the report. This may not be what you want. Post back with specifics as to what report you are currently trying to modify, and what exactly you are trying to achieve. It might be helpful if you include the version of QB you are currently using, as well.

You are right, it is the Cust bal Detail. Since I want to see a possibly a year's worth of information, I want all the previous paid information, but I don't want those customers with zero balances.

My clients have tenants, so the old tenants who have zero balances should not be showing up for the same apartment, ie apt #101 could have 3 tenants in 1 year, I only want to see the current tenant, not any old tenant.

I found that after I mark my old customers as inactive, I can rename all of them to the same name, consolidating them into one inactive customer.

For example, if you have 20 customers that you hope to never see again, you can make each as inactive,

then you can open these inactive customers and change their name to "old".

Each name that is changed to "old" will be consolidated,

leaving you with one customer named "old" (or whatever you want to name it) and you will have a cleaner customer list.

I did this with names that I used when I was testing my database/quickbooks.

Actually, the customers do not need to be inactivated to be merged together. The downside to this is, once a name is merged with another name, it cannot be 'unmerged'. So make sure you will never need individual information for your customers in the future before doing this.