Here is the question this module exists to answer: when did this licence actually lapse? An auditor asks it. A bank asks it before it lends. An insurer asks it after a claim. Your own lawyer asks it when a contract signed on a particular date is disputed. Every one of those questions is about a date in the past, and every one of them is unanswerable if your records only ever show the present.

The mental model: a renewal is a new record, not a new date. Press Renew and the module creates a new licence record, links it to the one it replaces, and marks the old record Renewed. Two records now exist where one did before. That is not clutter — it is the history, and it is the entire point of the feature.

The click path. Open the licence being replaced and press Renew. Fill in the new issue and expiry dates from the new document, attach the new scan, and activate the successor. The predecessor is left alone: you do not edit it, you do not delete it, and you do not tidy it away.

The same licence number is normal; two live licences carrying it are not. Renewing a trade licence normally keeps the number, so the successor may carry the same one as its predecessor and the module allows exactly that. What it will not allow is two live licences sharing a number for the same company and type — which is the correct restriction, because if two current records claim the same licence, one of them is wrong and the module cannot tell you which.

What editing the expiry in place would destroy. Everything. Change the date on the old record and the database now says the licence ran continuously from its first issue to its latest expiry, which is a sentence nobody at the company ever wrote and which may not be true. A gap between two licences disappears. A change of licence number disappears. And the answer to when did this lapse becomes a confident "it never did". Editing the date is faster, in the way that not keeping receipts is faster.

Worked example. Falcon Ridge Interiors LLC renews its trade licence twice, and the chain on file afterwards reads like this:

Now look at the join between the first two rows. The first licence expired on 13 April 2025 and the second was issued on 22 April 2025. There are nine days in there when the company had no current trade licence on file, and they are visible only because nobody edited anything. Those dates are what those two documents say — they are not a term, not a rule, and not something to carry across to your own licence, which will say what it says. What the module guarantees is that whatever yours says survives the next renewal.

The failure mode. Somebody "saves time" by opening the current record and typing the new expiry date over the old one. Nothing warns them, the screen looks right, the licence appears current — and the nine-day gap above, together with every gap before it, has been erased from the only place it was ever written down. If it has already happened, do not try to reconstruct the past by editing further: record the current licence correctly from today, and put what you know about the earlier ones in the record's chatter, where it is at least dated and attributed.