Microsoft released the new "Modern Policy" in October 2019 making Dynamics GP an even more successful and resilient business tool. Businesses that have been using Dynamics GP for decades, forget that data builds up as users add data. Every time you add more data, it becomes slightly harder to process. Following a couple years of inputting new data, posting transactions, closing out each month, running year-end processes, and using the system to run your business, you start to observe that the time to process increases slightly each time. Then a little bit more. Suddenly, a lot more.

You start running month-end overnight. Year-end closes get run over the weekend. Hopefully everything goes off without a hitch. However, many companies have turned to archiving as their way to keep Dynamics GP running smoothly.

Archiving is Key to Working More Efficiently in Dynamics GP

Moving historical information from the 'live' company to an 'archive' company is called Archiving. Archiving your data in Dynamics GP will reduce the size of your live company database and improve system performance while posting, running reports, performing file maintenance, and day-to-day use.

Designed to increase performance, many companies have turned to Company Data Archive, a product developed by our friends at Professional Advantage. Considered the most efficient way to archive for nearly two decades, CDA keeps your data in an archived location so that you can free up your database to run at optimal performance.

With CDA, companies can archive years of historical data across a variety of modules, moving everything you need to keep (but don’t need on hand at all times) into the archive company.

Reasons to Archive

There are many reasons we recommend and put into action Company Data Archive for our GP clients:

• Upgrade with Ease: With a smaller live database, you can move to the newest edition of GP much more smoothly.  With only the information you need immediately on the live database, you can then upgrade your historical data on your own schedule. With many companies already excited about the newest GP edition, archiving will make life much easier.
• Optimize Hardware Use: As the database grows, and starts taking up a lot of disk space, it will take SQL longer and longer to run backup and restore processes. By keeping your live company data smaller, you won’t take up as much disk space. Better yet? You can move archive data to a less optimal hardware.
• Declutter Your Reports: By using Company Data Archive, users can streamline and declutter their inquiries and reports in GP. If you’re tired of getting irrelevant data even if you set date ranges for a report, CDA can help.
• Increase Performance: If SQL is scanning millions upon millions of rows from the temporary tables it generates, that process is going to take some time. However, by archiving, you can greatly reduce the size of the scan and number of rows, making reports, look-ups, and inquiries.

But Archiving Core Modules Only Gets You So Far

CDA is an amazing tool used by companies across the nation and around the world. But what if you use Analytical Accounting? What if you want to free up data generated by Project Accounting, Field Service Management, Fixed Asset Management, or a variety of third-party applications? What if you want to archive data onto a completely different server or archive specific groups of vendors or customers?

Dynamics GP customers who use Analytical Accounting tend to accumulate large amounts of data due to the ability to extend and customize financial data with an unlimited number of user-defined transaction dimensions. It’s a great function for companies who need it, but it’s by no means a ‘light’ function.

Often, companies will use CDA to archive their core modules, only to realize just how much space and processing power Analytical Accounting takes up. That’s where Company Data Archive Plus comes in.

If you use Analytical Accounting (AA) with Dynamics GP, and you are archiving your Dynamics GP data using Professional Advantage’s Company Data Archive (CDA) product, you’ll be thrilled to hear about our add-on solution.

With Crestwood’s CDA Plus AA extension, your AA data will not be left behind. You can access all your important AA data right along with your Dynamics GP data in the archive file. For example, we installed CDA at a client site, taking a database size of 103 GB and reducing it to less than 35 GB, while maintaining the data in an ‘archived company’.

Ready to learn more about this or one of the many other Crestwood solutions for GP? Looking for a partner who can help you upgrade your GP solution and who can support you for the long run? Look no further than Crestwood. Get to know more about us and contact us for more details.

May 15, 2020 by Crestwood Associates

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Tags: Analytical Accounting, Company Data Archive, Data Archive, Dynamics GP
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