Overview of Accounting Data Archive and Purge

Archive and purge your accounting data to manage legal requirements and data volume growth.

Data retention policies require that organizations retain active data and maintain a cold storage or backup of inactive data to meet legal and compliance requirements. You can use the Accounting Data business object archive and purge solution to archive and purge the inactive accounting data according to your data retention policies. This allows users to access only the active data in Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP for the fiscal years of interest.

The Accounting Data business object consists of the following embedded business objects:

• General Ledger Journals
• General Ledger Balances
• Subledger Journals
• Subledger Balances

Here are the main steps in the Accounting Data business object archive and purge process flow.

1. Manage the archive and purge policies.
2. Enable the business object for archive.
3. Validate the accounting data.
4. Archive the accounting data.
5. Purge the accounting data.

Managing Archive and Purge Policies

Companies are legally required to retain certain information for a specified period of time.

The country's legislature that's associated with the data mandates what information must be retained and for how long. Generally, data is mandated to be kept for a certain number of years, which is known as the legal retention period. Companies typically purge the data immediately upon reaching the end of that period.

You define policies that specify how long, in fiscal years, to retain the accounting data until it can be archived, and how long, in fiscal years, to retain the archived accounting data until it can be purged.

You can override the retention duration until purge for specific ledgers or for specific ledger and primary balancing segment value combinations.

Enabling Business Object for Archive

Before you can archive the Accounting Data business object, you must first prepare and enable the following embedded business objects. This is a one-time step.

• General Ledger Journals: Journal entries in Oracle General Ledger.
• General Ledger Balances: Standard, average, and encumbrance balances in General Ledger.
• Subledger Journals: Subledger journals for Oracle Accounting Hub subledgers.
• Subledger Balances: Supporting reference and control account balances for all subledgers.

It's recommended that you perform this step well in advance of the archive step, instead of waiting until right before you want to run the archive process for a fiscal year and accounting calendar. This will significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to prepare the business objects, especially if this step is done before any data is populated.

You can prepare the business objects in any order. You can also enable the business objects in any order. The only requirement is that a business object must first be prepared before it can be enabled.

Validating Accounting Data

This step checks that the data for all periods within the selected calendar and fiscal year combination is eligible for archiving.

Validation must be successful before you can continue to the archive step.

Here are the validations.

• The end date of the periods within the fiscal year must meet the specified retention duration.
• All prior periods must be archived.
• The period status for all periods within the fiscal year must be either Never Opened or Permanently Closed for all ledgers associated with the selected calendar.
• There are no unposted journals in General Ledger.
• There are no journals pending import to General Ledger.
• There are no unaccounted transactions in General Ledger.
• There are no accounted transactions pending transfer to General Ledger.
• There are no outstanding reversals for Subledger Accounting journals when transaction reversal is enabled.
• There are no incomplete multiperiod accounting entries for Subledger Accounting journals and the original accrual entry pertains to one of the accounting periods being archived.

Archiving Accounting Data

This step removes the accounting data from the main tables and moves it into the archive tables.

Once the accounting data is archived, users will no longer be able to access it from Oracle Cloud ERP applications.

Caution: Perform this step with caution. Once the accounting data has been removed from the main tables it can’t be restored back into Oracle Cloud ERP.

Purging Accounting Data

Once the transaction or balance data has been moved to the archive tables it will eventually need to be purged completely from Oracle Cloud ERP.

This step removes the accounting data from the archive tables after the specified legal retention duration is met. You must purge the accounting data to free up the storage the archive tables are using. If the accounting data isn’t purged, then the size of the database will keep growing.