How do I archive data with Dynamics NAV?

So you’ve had you Dynamics NAV system for a few years now and your data volumes have steadily grown. Trouble is, reports that once ran in an instant now take many minutes and sometimes hours. You end up having to wade through lots of old accounts and items which long ago stopped being used  and have even been blocked but still appear in all the default unfiltered lists.

So there’s two halves to this – the master data and the transactions.

The master data records can be deleted (admittedly one by one by default), as long as there is not a transaction for them in a financial year that has not been closed. Be aware that the deletion locks quite a few tables for a while (as the associated transactions are deleted) and may stop some reporting working. A sales invoice cannot be printed once the customer has been deleted for instance and if you need that for your VAT records you could be in trouble.

Often its better just to get the default lists to not show blocked records and leave them, remember you can set a saved view to include them if you might need to get them back.

The second half of this question are the transactions – here there is better news in that there are standard date compression processes to consolidate the transactions. Don’t forget that most totals in Dynamics NAV are made up of a sum of all the relevant transaction so deleting item ledger entries from a decade ago will affect the quantity it shows on inventory now, for instance.

Dynamics-nav-_-date-compression

What the data compression process does is delete the detail and replace it with one entry that keeps your current values correct. That means all the sales to a customer years ago can be replaced with one, making your data much smaller but still keeping the reporting integrity. Better still you can compress the data for a particular transaction for a date range, and so slowly work your way through year by year because again it will take a while. Practically, for a lot of companies it’s an overnight process they leave running; if you’re a 24×7 business then this is a process for most of your public holiday’s or shut downs.

The value of the detail warehouse ledger entries (so internal warehouse movements) ten years after the event are surely limited. Limiting your data will make the system perform better especially for reporting. Regardless, you will have to do it one day, so I would advise you determine a policy and start it now before complaints about poor performance force your hand.