What Transactions are Cleared?

Ledger cleardown is a process which enables you to remove historical or redundant transactions from your business unit ledger and replace them with summarized balance transactions. You are not obliged to perform a ledger cleardown ever. But as transactions accumulate your processes and reports will slow down. For optimum performance you should clear down as often as possible.

The function Ledger Cleardown (LCL) tries to eliminate all transactions for periods up to and including the selected period, for the selected accounts, including closed accounts if they are within the selected account code range. You cannot clear down transactions for the current period. You are also warned if you choose to clear down transactions for last year, since you might require these figures to be shown on reports.

The balance type setting for the chart of accounts code determines how the transactions for the account are treated during period cleardown:

On Balance Forward accounts, all transactions are cleared down, unless they have an allocation marker of Withhold.
On Open Item accounts, transactions with an allocation marker of Reconciled, Correction, Allocated or Paid, are cleared down.

Note: You can use Account Allocations (ACA) to set the appropriate allocation marker to close transactions.

A transaction which is otherwise eligible for removal, is not cleared down if it is a provisional posting.

Note: If the Check Transaction Reference option is selected on Ledger Cleardown (LCL) a transaction is not cleared down if it has been posted to an account with an Agency/Broker Account Type of Client or Carrier, and other transactions with the same transaction reference are not eligible for cleardown.

The transactions removed by Ledger Cleardown (LCL) are either physically deleted from the system, or moved into an archive file.

Budget Transactions

You can run Ledger Cleardown (LCL) against a budget ledger to summarize and remove budget transactions in the same way as actual transactions. There is however one exception to this. Budget transactions are always deleted rather than archived, regardless of the Ledger Archiving setting in Ledger Setup (LES).

When you run a year cleardown, all of the budget transactions up to, and including, the specified year are cleared. Summary balances are posted in the last period of the specified year for each account and analysis code combination. So, if you want to retain a budget for historical reporting purposes you should not run a year cleardown against the appropriate budget ledger.

Balance Transactions

Ledger Cleardown (LCL) replaces the cleared down transactions with balance transactions. By keeping totals like this, financial reports can report on historic period balances even though the transactions have been removed or archived.

Rather than creating a single transaction that summarizes all of the cleared down transactions on an account for a period, several summarizing transactions are created. These reflect the combinations of account, period, analysis codes, currency code, allocation marker, asset code, asset subcode and asset indicator on the transactions being summarized.

If you no longer require some of the analysis, you can reduce the number of balance transactions by defining analysis code consolidations. Analysis codes on transactions in the selected dimensions are ignored and the transactions are summarized as if these analysis codes did not exist.

After clearing down, the new balance transactions show a journal number, and if relevant, an allocation reference of zero. The allocation and transaction date and period are set to the corresponding values from the most recent transaction that has been cleared.