Archiving finalized transactions

To support correct archiving in a multicompany structure, the following rules apply:

• Each company must have its own archive company. Companies cannot share an archive company.
• The structure of archive companies must be an exact copy of the live environment.
• A company must keep the same archive company until the end of its lifetime. Once data has been archived, you cannot change the archive company.

If extra archiving capacity is required, it is recommended that you set up a second archiving environment, which must also be an exact copy of the live environment. Define the companies of the second archive environment as the archive companies of the companies of the first archive environment. If necessary, a third and more archiving environments can be set up. You must then archive the data from each archive company to its archive company in the second archiving environment, and so on.

When you archive the data, LN builds an array with all the companies of the group and the archive company linked to each company. If any of the companies in the group does not have an archive company, LN reports an error and aborts the archiving process.

Batches and batch lines are only archived and/or deleted if you perform archiving and deletion in the company in which they exist. This is always the source company. Any intercompany documents and related finalized transactions that belong to the batch are not archived and/or deleted until the target company is archived.

If the batch has been deleted from the live environment, such intercompany documents and transactions will then temporarily exist without a batch in the live environment until the target company’s transactions are archived. Therefore, it is recommended to archive all the companies of a group within a short time.

Finalization runs are also archived. A finalization run can only be deleted from the live environment if all the attached batches have also been deleted.

Financial documents are archived and/or deleted if you perform archiving and deletion in the company in which they exist. For each document, LN searches whether a related intercompany document exists.

If the document’s transaction type indicates that the document numbering does not have to be in a fixed sequence, the document is not deleted from the live environment, to avoid duplicate document numbers.

A finalized transaction is not deleted from the live environment if the fiscal year of the transaction does not equal the fiscal year of the batch and the fiscal year of the transaction cannot yet be archived. If the Archive option is selected, the related batch, batch line, and document are copied to the archive company and retained in the live environment.

If a transaction is still referenced by open sales orders or purchase orders, it is marked as Deleted but not actually deleted. The related batch, batch line, and document are copied to the archive company and retained in the live environment. They are deleted when the referenced open transactions are closed and archived, for example, when you run the Archive/Delete Fully Paid Purchase Invoices (tfacp2250m000) session

If the transaction’s ledger account is a matchable account, any related matching data is also archived.

During the archiving process, the originating company of the finalized transaction is replaced with the originating company’s archive company. In this way, the archive environment will not contain references to the live environment.

During archiving, intercompany document relations are also copied to the archive environment. In the archive environment, these relations are updated in such a way, that each document in the relation refers to the environment in which the document actually exists. In the live environment, the document relation is retained until all related finalized transactions are deleted. For invoice-related transactions, this only occurs during the removal of fully-paid invoices. The document relation is also updated in the live environment, in order to refer to the archived document if all related finalized transactions have been removed from the live environment.

After the normal archiving process, an additional archiving step is performed in which all transactions and documents in the live company that arise from intercompany postings, are archived. During this step, intercompany relations are archived and/or deleted as described earlier.

Batches, batch lines, and documents that have the Deleted status are deleted from the live environment, unless the document’s transaction type indicates that the document numbering does not have to be in a fixed sequence. Such documents are not deleted from the live environment, to avoid duplicate document numbers.