Peachtree “archives”, of both the home-brew variety and those created directly from within the program, have been around for some time. Of late however, we have been fielding more questions about them, as users find they need more generous access to financial data from closed fiscal years than Peachtree can provide.

In simple terms, a Peachtree archive is a “read only” snapshot, or copy, of your live database, as of the moment you create the archive.  In Premium and Quantum editions, the archive creation process can be run from directly within the software.  For Peachtree Complete, the user must “manually” create an archive outside of the application interface.

In Premium and Quantum, the “Archive Company” routine is available either from the File menu or as an option in the closing “wizard” when a year-end close is run.  The routine asks the user to give a name to the archive file (it defaults to a name which includes the current system date) when creating it. We recommend that you NOT accept this naming suggestion, but instead use something somewhat more descriptive, like “FY2010 before close”, or “pre-chart of accounts change”, or something that will help you find what you are looking for when you need to peek in the archives.

And the whole point of creating an archive is of course so you can return to it to look something up when needed. Let’s review how that works.

To open an archive, choose the File menu and select Open Archived Company.  Peachtree will then present you with a list of all of the archives that have been created for the particular live company from which you opened the list. If you are looking for an archive for a different Peachtree company, open that other live company first, then choose Open Archived Company.

The reason for this slightly confusing navigation scheme (for users with multiple Peachtree companies, anyway) is that the archives Peachtree creates are physically stored within the data folder that holds your live data, in a folder named “Archives”. You cannot choose where to create the archives, and when opening an archive you cannot choose what folder to look in. Peachtree will always and only look for an archive file to open from within the Archives folder within your company data folder.

Once you have opened a Peachtree archive, you can perform all of the normal lookup and  search functions, and run any reports for that company you may need for that particular time frame. The only thing you cannot do is change any of the data. The database and all of the tables within it are permanently stored in a “read only” state, removing the possibility of making changes to archival data (I good thing, in our opinion!).

Should you accidently move, damage, or destroy your archive database, you can restore it to its original location (so it can be opened) via the “Restore Archive” routine from the File menu. This will allow you to browse out to the location of the archive to be restored, and then restore it to the folder where Peachtree needs to house it in order to allow it to open.  It is important to note that this “restore archive” process does not restore the archive into your live data, or replace any live database. It only puts the archive file back where it belongs to make it usable again.

If you are using Peachtree Complete instead of Premium or Quantum, you will need to “manually” create your archive to replicate this product functionality. Basically, you will need to make a physical copy of your live database folder, give the copied folder a different name, and then change security settings on that copied database from within Peachtree to make the files “read only” for all users. This is definitely a “home brewed” solution, which does not offer all of the functionality of the Peachtree Premium and Quantum Archiving routine, but it does give you access to data and reports that would otherwise be inaccessible.

If you have questions or issues with creating and managing Peachtree database archives, give us a call at 610-941-2116 to see if we can help you figure out an archiving procedure that is right for your company.