Karen, while we do not keep GL documents permanently, we have
successfully generated reports from SAP for long term retention, for
example, with our payroll registers (75 year retention; transferred to
microfilm). 

My point is that many longer term retention requirements can be met by
producing and saving summary reports for long term retention in another
system/media, as opposed to retaining all data long term so the report
can be generated on request. This is not an approach that SAP
maintainers or users are likely to be familiar with, even though it may
seem obvious to us.

This does, however, require an identification of what information out of
general ledger is required for long term maintenance. We have had some
success in seeking to identify the business purpose behind the long term
requirements, identifying the information that meets those purposes,
then developing/saving the reports that contain that information. IN
this way, for example, we determined that it is unnecessary to retain
all FI documents due to a long term capital asset requirement that may
apply to only a small portion of those documents (instead, we will be
addressing this either in future archiving of the asset module - much
smaller in size - and/or by ensuring that alternative records sources
such as project files contain the needed information). Again, most SAP
users/developers are used to reports as being simply on-demand summaries
of existing data. They don't think of the reports as being potential
records themselves, yet this offers a potential solution to many of the
long term data retention issues you may encounter.

Dwight Wallis, CRM
Records Administrator
Multnomah County Records Management Program
1620 SE 190th Avenue
Gresham, OR 97233
phone: (503)988-3741
fax: (503)988-3754
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