Karen, thanks for your response, as it gives me a chance to clarify. We
do keep our annual financial report permanently. This report is not
generated from SAP, although it is developed utilizing data in SAP.
Rather, it is generated as part of an annual audit process. As Pilar
pointed earlier, the actual data used to generate this "output" does
not, itself, have to be retained permanently, at least in our
jurisdiction.

As you are in Canada, with different requirements than ours, my
suggestion is to do what I did: get together with your SAP archiving
team and the GL staff to determine archiving strategies. Its been
helpful as a basis for our discussions to use our retention schedules as
a start to the conversation, and to get folks to view them more as
descriptive of a function or goal we are seeking to achieve, less as
prescriptive of specific documents or data elements required,
particularly when the schedule is written in a broad sense that "may
include" certain documents.  Together, you can all start hashing out
what is exactly needed to meet these functions/goals (for example, in
our case with payroll and asset related records). 

To be honest, I am not going to be able to offer specifics that would be
meaningful to you; I think what is really needed is a process that
involves your expertise, the SAP archiving team, and what we call the
"business process owners". As an example of this, I am the business
process owner of SAP archiving and disposition, and I interact with the
business process owners of GL and Payroll functions, as well as the SAP
project team/leader on this particular project. We all have to sign off
on finished documents describing what is being archived, and the process
to be used to achieve that.

Note that SAP archiving is not easy; the development of each archiving
object requires careful planning, even when utilizing SAP's
pre-configured archiving objects. Note also that SAP, as an enterprise
system, may present disposition challenges, particularly if your
organization is siloed. This is because each silo may have a different
use for the same shared data. IN the case of capital assets, we
discovered that the real concern existed with our Facilities group, as
they need information about who did what on a given structure if they
sell that structure, as part of their due diligence. In spite of the
fact that they had been using FI documents to meet this need, the "who"
information could be found elsewhere. This gave us an opportunity to
look at alternative data sources, and records keeping strategies,
without having to retain all FI documents "for the life of the structure
plus X years". (I'm beginning to understand a small portion of the SAP
technical jargon - a scary prospect. FI documents are general ledger,
accounts receivable, accounts payable, and public sector collections and
disbursements). 

Hope this helps!

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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