The approval history that vanishes

Thirty days after a workflow task last moved, it disappears from the approval screens. Oracle documents the schedule and says it cannot be turned off. The history is not destroyed, but it moves to tables most users will never find.

RuleExtract workflow tasks continuously into an approval-event fact you own. The retention rule should be yours, and it should be forever.

Neversay the purge deletes the data. It vanishes from the screens with no opt-out, and survives in archive tables most users cannot reach.

◆ The scheduledaily archive, 30-day purge, no off switch.

Oracle Fusion archives completed workflow tasks automatically, every day. Thirty days after a task was last updated, it is purged from the approval screens. The documentation states the schedule plainly and adds that the archive and the purge "can’t be changed or stopped." There is no profile option and no opt-out.

The precision matters: purged does not mean destroyed. The tasks survive in the BPM archive tables, and a delivered OTBI subject area for archived tasks can still reach them.

Almost nobody knows that subject area exists, so the screens where people actually look show nothing. The HCM transaction console keeps a separate copy of approval history, with retention you can configure. The honest sentence is this: the history vanishes from the approval screens with no opt-out, and survives in archive tables most users cannot reach.

◆ Where it hurtsthe trail goes missing exactly when someone asks for it.

The question	What the 30-day purge does to it
Who approved this requisition?	Asked by an auditor months later. The approval screens show nothing, and customers report exactly this on the community forums.
Control testing evidence	Sampling approvals across a year needs a year of tasks. The screens hold a rolling 30 days.
Escalation disputes	Who held the task, and for how long, is unanswerable once the task is purged from view.
Cycle-time analysis	Needs every event, kept for years. The next page in this catalog covers what that unlocks once the events are owned.

◆ The owned answeran append-only approval-event fact, retained forever.

The build is continuous extraction of workflow tasks into an approval-event fact in your warehouse: one row per task action, appended as it happens, never purged. Each event carries the approver, the action, the timestamp, and the document it belongs to, so the trail joins straight back to the requisition, order, or invoice.

-- who approved requisition 4711, answerable forever
SELECT approver, action, action_date
FROM fct_approval_event
WHERE document_type = 'requisition'
  AND document_number = '4711'
ORDER BY action_date

The same fact is the foundation for approval cycle time, the analytics the tenant cannot produce at all. And the purge is one more instance of the pattern this catalog documents everywhere: the system only knows now.

Use case

Problem

Workflow tasks are purged from the approval screens 30 days after last update, on a schedule Oracle says cannot be changed or stopped, so approval history is missing when auditors ask.

What we build

Continuous extraction of workflow tasks into an append-only approval-event fact in your warehouse, retained forever and joined to the documents they approved.

What you get

An approval trail that outlives the purge: every task, every approver, every action date, answerable years later with one query.

Can you show who approved a requisition from last year?

We ship the approval-event fact that keeps the trail forever.

Talk to us

Terms on this page

ERP: Enterprise resource planning, the system of record for operations and finance.
OTBI: Oracle Transaction Business Intelligence, the embedded reporting tool inside Fusion.
BPM: Business process management, the workflow engine that routes approvals.
HCM: Human capital management, the people side of the suite.
workflow task: One approval request routed to one person or group.
worklist: The screen where a user’s pending and completed tasks appear.
purge: Removing tasks from the approval screens. Here, on a fixed schedule.
archive table: Where purged tasks survive, outside the screens users see.
subject area: A packaged set of fields the embedded reporting tool can query.