i'd ask IT if they have some kind of retention policy and they're cleaning them out or archiving them.

Or, if you had an upgrade, it could be that they weren't migrated.

The best place to look for them, though is through the viewer.  I say that because if someone repointed Paperless to start making the docs in a new folder, you'd never know.  See what it looks like in there.  You may find broken hyperlinks.

As RSMcnamara said, my guess would be that they were not migrated.  If you have access to your pre-2018 version, it should be easy enough to see where Paperless Office is pointing - if it's not the same as 2018, they were not migrated.

I can see why you would say this based on what I wrote but the file locations did not change.  We have been trying to figure this problem out since we commissioned Paperless Office in 2014.  Other priorities have always been higher but an incident earlier this week reminded me that it would be nice to get this fixed.

See if someone is deleting the orders.  I remember a reference somewhere to deletions removing the associated Paperless documents.

I see the same files in the viewer that I see in Windows Explorer.  Paperless Office setup points to the same folders they have always pointed to.  There are four people who use Sage, me, my wife, my mother, and my sister.  I am the IT department for our company, so I know the data retention policy by heart...KEEP EVERYTHING FOREVER.  Our policy is based on the belief that we won't ever generate enough data to overwhelm our budget for new hard drive space.

I have checked the folder we have configured for Purchase Order Forms every month, often every week, and I have NEVER seen more than a 100 PDF files in it.  There are always some that are from two or more years ago, yet there are many, many missing from a few months ago that I can prove were there when the order was new.  They are attached to emails in my sent mail folder.  I have done server wide searches for such files to test the migration/reconfiguration ideas too, the files are not there.

The four of us work closely together in our office; we discuss this problem from time to time.  The only PO and SO that get deleted are the ones that get canceled.  This is maybe one per 100.

My theory for a long time has been that some check box in Sage is set to delete the PDF when the order reaches some particular status but I have never found a check box anything like that AND I have never been able to precisely correlate an order's status change to the disappearance of it's PDF.

I have searched for server operating system parameters that could cause this be have had no luck.  Something is removing these files but I am at a loss as to what it could be.

If the entries are gone from the paperless logs then it pretty much has to be a Sage process doing the removals.  (There is no technical link between the table data and the PDF file, only a logical link).

Did you search the Sage knowledge base?

I did search the knowledge base, and the forums, before I posted.  My wife just off the phone with a Sage tech regarding and unrelated issue.  I had her ask him about this before she hung up.  He claims this how it was designed to work.  He said the PDF is deleted when the order is completed.  He said that they have had this question before and that we should post an enhancement request.  I will do so but this one sure seems like a no-brainer to me.  I am in an industry where I have to look up PO and SO information that is over 10 years old sometimes to manage a vendor or customer request.  We are going to need to set up a task on the server to mirror our entire Paperless Office folder structure to a location out of reach of Sage 100c to accomplish what we want.