What Is Records Retention?
Organizations create records through daily business transactions. These records are considered active for as long as they are needed to be easily accessible for the organization to use to perform its current functions. Once a record is no longer useful for performing current activities, it becomes inactive. But it must be kept, or “retained,” as long as it is needed to meet the organization’s administrative, fiscal, legal, or historical requirements. The length of time the record must be kept to meet those requirements is referred to as its retention period. Because records grow at an excessive rate and cost the organization resources to maintain and store (regardless of the format), they must be disposed of at the end of their retention period. The retention requirements for an organization’s records are recorded on an approved retention schedule, which is a comprehensive list of records series (a group of related records that are filed/used together) that indicates for each series th
