Calculate your potential savings with our ROI Calculator
ROI CalculatorRecords Retention Policy is a systematic framework that specifies the duration for which a specific organization has to retain any records related to financial, legal, operational, or compliance issues before they can be either archived or destroyed safely. The Records Retention Policy outlines the retention periods, documentation requirements, and governance requirements that allow the records to be kept in active status for the purpose of audits and regulatory reviews.
Companies create a formal retention policy in line with their compliance programs and retention policies. The purpose of creating a retention policy is to make sure that companies retain their financial accounting documents, transaction data, and regulatory documents throughout their entire life.
The main role of a records retention policy is to ensure that organizations have all the necessary records for the right duration while being compliant with the laws and regulations. Organizations often need to keep financial records, accounting documents, and contracts for several years due to financial audits, legal questions, and inspections by regulatory institutions.
The use of retention policies allow organizations to manage their documents properly and keep track of when a particular record is archived or discarded. Good governance is able to ensure that the necessary documents are always accessible for reporting purposes.
Retention policies provide guidance on the questions of where and what kind of records should be archived and for how long. Once the retention period of the data is over, it can be deleted or archived in accordance with the requirements of the organization, which leads to better storage of data.
Retention policies exist mainly for following regulations. Entities which are bound by the requirements of data retention do not possess the capability of keeping all data indefinitely. In fact, such an objective is rather pointless.
Instead, they realize that selective retaining and deleting of data is all that counts in this case, depending on the industry and geographical location. To illustrate, personnel files may require one period of retention while some sensitive medical or financial documents may demand a different duration.
Despite the fact that entities often develop their own data retention policy, making sure that it complies with the relevant law can be a challenging issue. For this purpose, they have to rely on a specific template that corresponds to the regulation in their industry.
A typical data retention policy template will start with its objectives of retaining data, the people to whom it applies and the range of the policy. This will then point to applicable regulatory documents, statutes and rules. The next step in the template is to provide information on common data retention specifics. This will include a retention schedule, standards for the protection of data, standards for data destruction, and rules for the violation of the policy.
When developing your personal data retention policy, you must analyze all the personal data you possess thoroughly. This includes ensuring the policy covers data stored in databases, documents, e-mails, financial data, images, and any production data and video or audio records related to the processing of personal data.
You should then think about where the data is situated. In some cases, data kept in various places requires a separate retention policy. This is because different business or legal requirements apply to data stored in a given location and creating a single policy is not a viable option.
