Snapshot – how it works?

Snapshot Time: This takes the relevant information based on time validity. We can see the valid date in One Exposure table, fqm_flow-valid_from and fqm_flow-valid_to.

Figure 2: Date in CFA.PNG

Why Snapshot was designed:

It is designed for cash manager to justify his/her decision of yesterday(or a little bit more days ago) and find room for improvement. For example, if today the cash manager sees a significant shortage or surplus of cash, there might be 3 reasons:

(1) I made a mistake yesterday, that forget to prepare some huge need of cash, or

(2) yesterday some business department didn’t have right forecast. And in the case of (2), cash manager wants to dive deeper to see which entity(company code), which business(maybe HR? maybe AP? maybe ….) forget to have their forecast into the system, e.g. maybe a payment run wasn’t executed in time, or a remote system info wasn’t get in timely, or the data quality wasn’t good enough,… , or

(3) yesterday after I left my office, something happened, e.g. a customer paid huge amount of cash at 6pm, so our bank account will have huge surplus of cash.

How to handle snapshot data:

This is not the audit tool for the cash position history. It’s better to keep only short term snapshot history(like 1 day or 1 week) while deleting older than that. Keeping snapshot for too long period will take significant huge database space.

If you want to have one year history. This is unfortunately not the purpose this feature was designed as above. So what about this:

1. Short term: one possible way is they can export the cash position in the app “Cash Flow Analyzer” into excel at every month end or whatever time they like.

2. Long term: we consider to develop a new feature, it’s more a picture-like snapshot. Then end users take it at the time they need it. This new way hopefully will need less storage space.

More details:

• The parameter ‘Time Stamp’: exactly what range of time it will take. Before or After the given timestamp?

Ans: When you choose ‘Snapshot Cleanup’, this is how the Time Stamp is calculated.

Time Stamp = Time Stamp+ ‘0.9999999’, then data is deleted from table FQM_FLOW where               fqm_flow-valid_to date is less than or equal to Time Stamp date.

• What is ‘Deletion time scope’? What and how data is considered here?

Ans: When you choose ‘Delete Redundant Snapshot Flow’, the time stamp also considers the              ‘Deletion time scope’.

So if we give the date in timestamp as 08.03.2022 and Deletion time scope as 5 days, it will                check for all the redundant data from 03.03.2021 to 08.03.2021 (5 days).

• How it determines which are redundant data?

Ans: Currently the snapshot flows are generated when flow are rebuilt. For instance, one flow            generated three times and generated two snapshot flows. If the those two snapshot flows are            the same business value, we call those two snapshot flows are redundant snapshot flows.                  Using this deletion type can identify those flows and perform the deletion.

This deletion type will compare the data and perform the deletion. It is a time-cost activity and            it shall be executed in background mode(from the link).

• As the snapshot is created whenever the flows are rebuilt, and this creates a lot of data. So you can use the FQM_DELETE -> ‘Snapshot Cleanup’, every day to delete the snapshot data or schedule a background job for ‘Delete Redundant Snapshot Flow’ as per your business need. If you will keep the snapshot flows for long time, more data will be generated in fqm_flow.

See KBA 3288033 – Snapshot – how it works?

Disable snapshot: After switching on snapshot and system has snapshot data created, you want to switch off the snapshot, which is possible, but you need to follow the instruction to cleanup snapshot data from all systems.