Inventory Transactions Archive Feature in Public Preview (10.0.18)

In this blog, I am going to walk through a new feature that is in public preview from 10.0.18 that I have been learning more about. Over time, queries can slow down as your inventory transactions table (InventTrans) grows larger. If you've experienced this, then this feature may be for you.

When used, the Inventory transactions archive feature will allow you to archive inventory transactions from the InventTrans table but there are several criteria that you need to meet before the system will allow you to archive.

The pre-requisites criteria:

• Inventory transactions can only be archived from closed ledger periods.
• Financially updated outbound inventory transactions must have an issue status of ‘sold’.
• Inbound inventory transactions must have a receipt status of ‘purchased’.
• Inventory closing must be run on or after the to-period date of the archive.
• The period must be at least one year before the from-period date of the archive.
• There must not be any existing inventory recalculations.

When archived, the selected records will be moved from the InventTrans table to the InventTransArchive table. According to the documentation, inventory issue transactions and inventory receipts are archived separately, based on the combination of item ID (itemId) and inventory dimension ID (InventDimId). These are then put into the summarized issue and summarized receipt transactions. If the combination of itemID and inventDimId contains only one receipt or issue transaction, the transaction isn’t archived.

To enable the feature, you are looking for Inventory transactions archive in feature management. This feature cannot be disabled once enabled.

When enabled, you will have access to the menu: Inventory Management > Periodic Tasks > Clean up > Inventory transactions archive. Below is a screenshot of the inventory transaction archive page. You will see records of archival processes you’ve ran for a period here.

To proceed with an archival, you will click the inventory transactions archive button to configure the archival period and configure your batch job.  The system batch job is named ‘inventory transactions archive’ by default.

To set up the archival period, you will select the From date in closed ledger period and To date in closed ledger period parameters. If your ledger periods aren’t closed or you don’t meet the pre-requisites previously mentioned, your periods will not appear for selection. From here you will configure your batch job to run in the background like any other batch job and click OK. You’ll get a prompt asking you if you want to continue that you should read carefully. If you accept, your inventory transactions archive batch job goes to the batch queue for processing.  

Assuming there are archival processes in progress or that have finished, they appear back on the Inventory transactions archive main screen. Because of how many menu and field descriptions we need to cover, I copied the process for viewing archived records and those descriptions straight from the documentation for your convenience:

In the drop-down list at the top of the page select one of the following values to filter the archives that are shown in the grid:

• Active – Show only active archives, not reversed archives.
• All – Show all archives, both active and reversed.

For each archive in the grid, the following information is provided:

• Active – A check mark indicates that the archive is active.
• From date – The date of the oldest transaction that can be included in the archive.
• To date – The date of the latest transaction that can be included in the archive.
• Scheduled by – The user account that created the archive.
• Executed – The date when the archive was created.
• Reverse – A check mark indicates that the archive has been reversed.
• Stop current update – A check mark indicates that the archive is in progress, but it has been paused.
• State – The processing status of the archive. The possible values are Waiting, In progress, and Finished.

The toolbar above the grid provides the following buttons that you can use to work with a selected archive:

• Archived transactions – View the full details of the selected archive. The Archived transactions page that appears shows all the transactions in the archive.

To view more information about a specific transaction on the Archived transactions page, select it in the grid, and then, on the Action Pane, select Archived transaction details. The Archived transaction details page that appears shows information such as the ledger posting, related subledger references, and financial dimensions.

• Pause archiving – Pause a selected archive that is currently being processed. The pause takes effect only after the archiving task has been generated. Therefore, there might be a short delay before the pause takes effect. If an archive has been paused, a check mark appears in its Stop current update field.
• Resume archiving – Resume processing for a selected archive that is currently paused.
• Reverse – Reverse the selected archive. You can reverse an archive only if its State field is set to Finished. If an archive has been reversed, a check mark appears in its Reverse field.

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