Archiving for Unit4 Financials

With any accounting or financial management solution, regular archiving helps you keep control over the size of your datasets, speed up processing times and ensure ongoing optimum software performance.

In this blog post discover how archiving works in Unit4 Financials (previously known as Coda Financials) and the difference between the two types of archiving available.

There are two types of archiving:

Internal archiving

With internal archiving, information continues to reside within your main Unit4 Financials production database.

Tables in the internal archive are given an “arc” prefix. The transactions within these internally-archived tables can still be accessed through enquiries. To search archived items, all you need to do is change your selector to ‘archive’ instead of ‘books’.

External archiving

External archiving involves moving data from the Unit4 Financials production database to a separate archive database. Note however, that this archive database still resides on the same database server. As with internal archiving, externally archived data is held in “arc” tables. To do external archiving, you first must do internal archiving.

With any accounting system, the larger the dataset, the longer it takes to process requests (e.g. queries, searches and transactional reports). Especially if your Unit4 Financials users are experiencing a gradual drop-off in response speed over time, it’s a sign that archiving is likely overdue.

To avoid having to routinely process potentially millions of lines of irrelevant data for each request, it’s certainly worth focusing on the following:

• Establishing an archiving policy

Matters to consider here include whether and how often users need to query data that is over a year or two old. You should also look at how often your AP/AR teams need to query transactions paid/matched over a year ago.

• Ensuring a correct archiving set-up

As a start, you need to ensure the archiving feature in your Unit4 Financials system has been activated and configured according to your needs.

In short, yes. When you have archived your data in Unit4 Financials, that data remains searchable.

When you submit a query on the system, you have the option to search live data only, or include archived data. For most users, the majority of day-to-day queries relate only to recent data. So for these queries, users can stick with the default live data search setting. Regular archiving means that the system does not have to trawl through swathes of irrelevant data, thereby helping to maintain optimal search response times on routine tasks. On those occasions where you need to check historical data, you can simply switch the query type to include archived information.

This brief video further illustrates the differences between each archiving method to help you choose between the two. It covers the issues that commonly arise in archiving financial information and how you can resolve them within the system. We also share a case study illustrating the benefits of archiving.