Archive Accounting

The Archive Accounting utility permanently moves old transaction data on which you no longer need to perform work to a different part of your system, where it remains accessible in a read-only state but no longer impacts system performance. Archiving this data enables your system to use resources more efficiently.

You must run the Archive utility during a maintenance window, to allow it to run without interruption, and all users must be logged out of the system. You can run it as often as your organization deems necessary, but you will most likely need to run it annually or quarterly at most. Suspend any scheduled jobs, as they may conflict with the archiving process.

Important! Once data is archived, it cannot be restored to your system for additional work, although it will be viewable for reference. Organizations hosting Applied Epic on-premises (LAN users) should create a full backup of their data before running this utility.

Keep the following considerations in mind before archiving transaction data:

The Archive works backward from the Accounting Month you select, which must be at least two years prior to the current Accounting month.
Any months selected for archiving must be finalized in Procedures > Accounting > Month-End.
Transactions can only be archived if the Receivable and the Company Payable are closed. If transactions are associated to a policy, the policy must be expired.
Government payables must be closed or blank for all company splits.
Transactions prior to the Accounting Month you select will be archived for all agency structures.
Once items are archived, no further actions can be performed on them or on receipts, disbursements, vouchers, or reconciliation statements to which they are associated.
Archived transactions are excluded from reports.

Note: This article contains printing instructions that are only applicable if Applied Epic is installed locally on your computer. If you access Epic through a web browser such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or Microsoft Edge, you cannot print directly from within the system. See Printing for more information about the printing capabilities available from Epic Browser. All other steps in this article are applicable to both methods of accessing Epic unless stated otherwise.

From the Home screen, do one of the following:

Click Utilities on the navigation panel.
Click Areas > Utilities on the menubar.
Click the down arrow next to Home on the options bar and select Utilities.

From any other area of the program, do one of the following:

Click Home > Utilities on the menubar.
Click the down arrow next to Home on the options bar and select Utilities.

Click Archive on the navigation panel or Areas > Archive on the menubar.
Click Accounting on the navigation panel.
Use the date fields in the Criteria frame to Archive data prior to an accounting month of your choice.

Note: The month you select must be at least two years prior to the current Accounting Month. The system will archive all eligible transactions working backwards from your selected month. This means that if you have eight years of transaction data in your system and select an accounting month two years in the past, your first six years of data will be archived. Because this process can be time-consuming, you may want to archive your transaction data incrementally, running the utility on only one or two years’ worth of data at a time.

To begin the archive process, click the Archive button.

You are prompted, “Closed accounting data prior to (& including) [selected date] will be archived. Epic will lock out users during archival process. Important: Once data is archived, it cannot be restored to your system for additional work, although it will be viewable for reference. Continue?” Click Yes to continue.

Note (EpicCloud customers only): Depending on when you choose to run the utility, you may not notice a difference in the volume of your data until the following week, due to database maintenance that Applied performs each Sunday night. For this reason, Applied recommends scheduling the Archive to run on Saturday as a best practice.

The History list displays the following information for previous Archive jobs:

Archive Number: Unique number representing the archive batch
Archived By: The user who ran the archive job.
Criteria: The Accounting Month used to filter data for archiving
Archived: The date on which the archive job completed

Select an archive job in the list and click the View button to view further details for the job.

Click the Print button or select File > Print > Listview to print the History list.

After archiving is complete, Applied recommends running the Rebuilding Indexes and Update Statistics SQL Utilities, as the Archive utility moves a large amount of transaction data. Both of these SQL Utilities are run automatically for Applied EpicCloud users on Sundays, so it is best to run the Archive utility on a Saturday. For more information, see the Archive Accounting FAQ.