The following example shows the connection between document type life, account type life, secondary index life and the two archive index lives when archiving documents.

You enter the minimum number of days a document must remain in the system when you start the program. This period runs from the date noted in the document. In the example above, a minimum number of days has not been entered.

A customer invoice posted on March 5 is cleared on March 31. Since the document has open items, the system uses the clearing date, March 31, to determine whether document life, index life, and account life have been exceeded.

When you start the program on the key date of June 10, the system does not archive this document because the account life of 90 days has not been exceeded. However, when you start the program on the key date of July 10, the system archives the document since the specified life has been exceeded. A section of the document data is however stored in a secondary index where it remains until the life of this secondary index (360 days) has elapsed.

Archive indexes are deleted if all document-based or account-based archive indexes for a document can be deleted. This is the case after 720 days.