Accounting Data Archive and Purge

Use a policy-based approach to archive accounting data to enable efficient and proactive management of data growth, and to purge the accounting data in compliance with data retention requirements in various jurisdictions.

Accounting data that can be archived and purged includes General Ledger journals, General Ledger balances, Accounting Hub subledger journals, and supporting references and control account balances for all subledgers. Use Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Connector to extract archived accounting data to external storage areas before purging.

Perform these setup steps before archiving and purging the accounting data.

1. Set up the retention policies for archive and purge according to the legal retention requirements. Purge retention policies can be set up for the accounting data. These policies can be further overridden for a ledger and legal entity combination. Purge retention policies will determine when the archived data can be purged for a ledger and legal entity combination.

Manage Archive and Purge Policies

2.  Enable Accounting Data for Archive: You must prepare and enable each of the business objects for archive.

Enable for Archive

Once the setup is complete you can archive and purge the accounting data. Navigate to the Archive and Purge: Accounting Data page.

1. Select Actions-> Validate to validate the data for a fiscal year and accounting calendar combination. This action will check if the accounting data is valid for archive.
2. Once the validation is successful, select Actions-> Archive. This action will move the data from the transaction tables into the archive tables for a fiscal year and calendar at a time.
3. Optionally extract the archived accounting data from the Financials data stores in Oracle Business Intelligence Cloud Connector before purging it.
4. You can click the Purge button on the page to review the eligible archived data before it is purged.

Business benefits include:

•  Flexible retention of accounting data according to country-specific legal retention policies. This reduces the cost of compliance.
•  Allows customers to proactively manage the data growth in large volume transaction-based applications like Accounting Hub and General Ledger.
•  Brings a stable and smooth user experience to inquiries and reports even while a large amount of accounting data is growing in the system.

Steps to Enable

Enabling archive and purge feature capabilities is controlled from the ‘Manage Archive and Purge Policies’ page through the ‘Enable for archive’ button. This step prepares and enables Accounting Data for archive and purge.  Accessing the ‘Manage Archive and Purge Policies’ page does not require an opt-in choice, but requires the privilege described in the Access Requirements section below.

Tips And Considerations

• Existing customers can enable this feature to optimize and compress current accounting records. This will improve overall system performance across accounting processes and user pages. The enabling step alone does not perform any archive or purge steps until the retention period is defined and the archive processes are run.

• For existing implementations, the Enable for Archive step is a one-time activity to be performed during a low business activity processing window. This process takes time to complete depending on the data volumes of the tables. The process performs the two steps Prepare and Enable sequentially for each business object.

• Run the Archive and Purge processes during a time of year when there is low business activity because these processes are resource intensive and could slow down other processes. Purge can be done more frequently on a period basis if required.

• Enable audit for the Archive and Purge Retention Policies object before setting up the retention policies for archive and purge.

Key Resources

• Refer to the Overview of Accounting Data Archive and Purge and How You Archive and Purge Accounting Data topics in the Implementing Enterprise Structures and General Ledger guide on the Oracle Help Center.
• Refer to the Archived Accounting Data chapter in the Extract Data Stores for Financials guide on the Oracle Help Center.

Access Requirements

To access the Manage Archive and Purge Policies page, administrators need the Archive Financials Business Objects privilege (FUN_ARCHIVE_FINANCIALS_BUSINESS_OBJECTS_PRIV), which is assigned to the Financial Application Administrator job role (ORA_FUN_FINANCIAL_APPLICATION_ADMINISTRATOR_JOB).