Hi Amanda,

That is a great question! Having years worth of transactions certainly can cause reports to take longer to run and moving them to the History file is a great way to speed up the process.

It comes down to a question of which applications you would like to archive as each may have a different way of archiving due to the way transactions differ from module to module.

For instance, in Payroll you would use the Tools, Move, Transactions, Current to History function as outlined in KB81132.

For Cash Management you would use Tools, Move Entries as per KB207056.

Typically you would choose a cutoff date that works best for your company for each module and move all the transactions older than that cutoff using a condition. The condition may be different depending on the module but typically Accounting Date works well, for CM it asks you for the Ending statement date.

If you could give us a better idea of which modules you are interested in moving to history we would be able to give you a more specific example and KB article as you need.

Thanks Kyle,

I am looking at moving entries in AP, CM, JC, GL, PR, and AR for now.  We also use EQ, CN, BL, and PJ.  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Amanda,

I am going to give a list of KB articles per module for the ones you listed as currently interested in. I picked the ones that would be best suited to your needs:

AP: KB97436

CM: KB207056

JC: KB97387 - This article is not 100% what I wanted but it tells you how to move from Current to Current to move to an archive folder. You would use the same idea but do Current to History which would keep it inside the same data folder starting on step 4 of Moving Transactions to step 8.

GL: KB97495

PR: KB81132

AR: I found KB197039 about moving Misc Cash Receipts and, KB164654 about moving AR Invoices.

One more article you might find helpful is KB97140, "Why should I archive my data?"

There are links at the bottom for more applications.

Also KB93713 has a link to the Year End Procedures guide which has archiving steps for each module.

These articles can all be searched for on the Sage Customer Portal.

For any of these that you have questions about you may wish to call into support for that particular application as we do not all support the same skills and the process can differ per module.

Let me know if there is anything else I can help you with?

Thanks Kyle.  When you have already moved files do the new files that you are moving append to the existing folder or do you have to create a new one?

Kyle,

Does it matter how you store your history files?  Should you have a different folder for each year or just one for everything?

Amanda

Hey Amanda,

When you are moving from current to history, if the history file has never been used before it actually won't exist. Once its created it stays there and you add additional transactions to it.

Unless you are using named files, which I don't recall you mentioning, you will not have an option to have multiple History files, just a single history transaction file.

Both of these answers are based on the assumption that you are using the history file and not a completely separate archive data folder. Is that a correct understanding of your situation?

No we are not using named files.  So the history file will also run slow when we access it? We have not really decided what we are going to do and are trying to find out the best solution.

Amanda,

The files will start to run slower the more transactions are put in them, that is true. It comes down to a question of how often would you need to access these transactions vs the trouble of specifying which transaction file you want every time you run a transaction based task or report.

You could setup named files to distribute the transactions to individual files and then turn it back off to use your current and most recent transactions in your history.

That way if you needed to access something from 5 or 10 years ago you would just need to temporarily turned the named files back on. This might be a best of both worlds solution.

On the other hand, if you only need to run a report on the history file once a year it might not be that big of a deal.

Let me know what you think?

Thanks Kyle, I will talk to my boss about it but it sounds like the named files might be a waste of time.