Illustrating the Benefits of Unit4 Financials Archiving – A Case Study

For customers with high transactional volumes, the adoption of best practices around Unit4 Financials archiving allows them to significantly improve system performance and save storage space. A recent project undertaken by Millennium Consulting demonstrates the positive impact of archiving for Unit4 Financials users.

Read on to discover what we found, along with practical tips on addressing common archiving issues.

Recently, Millennium Consulting undertook a company archival project for a global player in the pharmaceutical industry. The period covered was from 1995 to 2015.

The archiving exercise revealed that more than half of the documents within the organisation’s database were capable of being stored more efficiently.. Through the project, we were able to free up a significant amount of disk space within the production database but more significantly, we de-risked the organisation’s accounting solution against performance degradation over time.

At the conclusion of the project, we found that the archive tables on the database amounted to a significant 2.2GB of space. In total, 821,773 documents were archived representing 58% of the total documents within that company.

Most of the customers we speak to say that the volume of financial data they are processing is growing year by year. This is partly down to organic development, i.e., as an organisation matures, the number of transactions it is involved in intends to increase as a matter of course. But other trends are also in play here. Notably, for compliance and performance management reasons, businesses recognise the value of capturing a much wider range of granular data relating to individual transactions. The flipside, of course, is that more data means a greater burden on storage capacity and system performance.

• Archive all dormant companies, initially to the internal database using arc tables. Straight after internal archiving, you can then transfer these tables to the external archive database.

• Externally archive all live companies, except for the last four or five years. Again, you need to archive internally before transferring the tables to the external database.

• Archive to the internal database all live companies, apart from the last two full years.

• We recommend leaving in the current books all live companies for the last two full years.

If you follow this approach, then at each financial year end, you need to undertake the following:

• Archive to the internal database the third oldest year (e.g., at the end of 2021, you would internally archive 2019)

• Archive to the external database the sixth oldest year (e.g., at the end of 2021, you would externally archive 2016)

You can learn more about the archiving function for Unit4 Financials in this brief demonstration video: