The data set is usually limited by the setting in Options on how long to save data. How long are you saving data?

Assuming you are referring to accounting practices vs technical how do you purge practices, my advice is:

1. For tax purposes, keep your info at least seven years. Tax returns can be amended back 3 years. IRS can go after you for seven years if there is a material understatement of tax. If they holler fraud, there is no limit (now why you would keep records forever if your were committing fraud is beyond me).

2. After that it really becomes a question to yourself of how far are you likely to go back and look at info? For most businesses, seven years is probably plenty, but you have to answer that question for yourself.

3. Obviously, the bigger your database, the slower it can become. If you really want to keep data a very long time, make a backup of your data and then purge your live data to retain a couple of years (your judgement call). Then if you really find that you needed something further back, look in your backup database.

Note that a large data set will NOT slow down processing. It will slow down ALE look ups and reports.

So-10 Years / AR-5 Years / AP-5 Years (1099-10 years)

Thanks, Reporting is actually a big part of our issue. Reports that hit the history files take a very long time and have a tendency to eat up the CPU. What are "ALE" look ups?

ALE is the look ups. If you have issues on reports then I would suggest using Microsoft Access as the data source. Download the historical tables and use queries to build smaller data sets and run the reports off of that. It will shorten the speed of the reports considerable.

Business Insights Explorer can slow down dramatically as well with larger databases.