An archive feature is included to allow past history to be moved from the current Phoenix database. A snapshot of your entire database is then moved to another folder, and is available when required. This will reduce the size of regular backups, and generally speed up the operation of the program.
WARNING: Due to the archived data not being able to be edited, only archive the data that you know you will only need to report on.
Recommendations:
•Leave at least 3 years of your current data for reporting
•Do a backup of the archived set of books and clearly identify it
•When updating or upgrading Phoenix update or upgrade the archived data as well as current sets of books
•When changing computers transfer the archived data to the new computer as well as current sets of books
Notes on Archiving
A New Start Date – Archiving will effectively give your set of books a new System Start Period. All accounts and category balances will begin on the date that you nominate as your new First Period. The dates available to restart at will be whole business periods. For example, if you have the financial years set as your business period in the set of books that you are archiving then you will only be offered the month of July but will be able to nominate the year which you want to restart your data. E.g. If your system originally started in July 98 and you choose to archive until June 04 then the new system start date will be July 04. (This means transactions will not exist in this set of books from before July 04).
“Past Uncleared” – any transaction/s from previous months that were unpresented prior to the new start date will be found under the “Past Uncleared” period in the current data set.
Deleting Accounts and Categories – Archiving will allow you to delete any accounts or categories that have not been used in the months following your archive. e.g. If you chose restart your set 07/04 then if any category hasn’t been used since that month, you will be able to delete it. The same applies to an account. Do not delete if your category or account has been used in a budget.
Reporting – as there have been changes made to your main dataset (e.g. unpresented transactions from June 05 will now appear under “Past Uncleared”, etc.), you will find there will be some impacts on various reports. e.g. A transaction previously reported in the period May 04 and uncleared would now appear in the “Past Uncleared” section. This impacts on most figures in all account types.
Merging – After an archive has been performed the archived data set is completely separate from the one in which you will continue to work. This means the two data sets, archived data and the current data, are unable to be combined or merged.
Opening Balances – There may be situations where you have transactions that were entered and uncleared prior to the new archive date. These transactions may be omitted from the opening balance calculation on some reports, such as the Trial Balance and Net Worth. The transactions will only be omitted from the opening balance when the report includes the very first month of your post-archive data. All reports not including the very first month will be unaffected.
