Retention Accelerator Guidebook

Introduction

The purpose of this guide is to help you assess the health of one of the key elements of your records and information management (RIM) programme: your records retention schedule. The records retention schedule is foundational to a defensible and actionable records and information management programme.

We’ll walk you through how to build, update, and/or assess your records retention schedule, along with its usage, and provide you with best practice recommendations and tips for its successful implementation in your RIM programme. An up-to-date and authorised schedule positions you to quickly identify records that have satisfied their retention period and can be defensibly destroyed. And you’ll be ready to take the next steps to do it in a cost- and time-effective way, thereby reducing operational costs and risk.

An up-to-date and authorised schedule positions you to quickly identify records that have satisfied their retention period and can be defensibly destroyed. And you’ll be ready to take the next steps to do it in a cost- and time-effective way, thereby reducing operational costs and risk.

How to use the retention schedule

What is a retention schedule?

A retention schedule is a policy that specifies how long your organisation’s records are to be kept — and by extension when they can be defensibly destroyed. The retention schedule is the cornerstone of your RIM programme and is crucial for risk management. It identifies your records according to function and assigns retention periods for them based on their operational and legal value. Employees at all levels of your business enterprise must use the retention schedule to adhere to federal and state recordkeeping regulations and requirements in order to avoid fines, sanctions, and damage to your reputation.

For maximum efficiency and user-friendliness, the retention schedule is organised in a logical hierarchical format. /