Record Retention Schedule

Documents and records are valuable to any organization and business. They help in various facets of the industry, such as financial and legal, and maintaining them is equally important. One doesn’t know when a record from a few years might be useful. But then again, there are some documents whose value decreases with time. There needs to be a retention date for those documents; they will be known as active documents within that date.

This would enable them to be demolished when they aren’t in use or aren’t considered active documents. An organization needs to maintain a record retention schedule to do this.

What is the record retention schedule?

A record retention schedule is crucial for every record management plan. It helps fulfill the organization’s requirements for keeping records.

Organizations design a record retention schedule that lists all the documents and the dates when they will be regarded as active documents. There can be many reasons behind maintaining a record retention schedule, but the most common are financial, legal, and historical.

Excel Worksheet Template

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Excel Worksheet Template

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Importance of record retention schedule:

When it uses the record retention schedule, a company gets its legal rights to retain the records. Therefore, an organization must use the retention schedule when it wants to keep records and decide how long it should keep them.

An organization should create and organize this schedule systematically to obtain the best benefits. In fact, the record retention schedule is essential for a sound recording system.

A record retention schedule should be detailed and serve its purpose well. It should consist of a table with the names and details of all the documents, and next to each document should be the date on which they will no longer be known as active documents. To make it more convenient, the schedule can be divided into sections or arranged according to the years.

What are the benefits of using the retention schedule?

The key benefits that can be availed by using the record retention schedule are:

1. This schedule ensures that the company is optimally using all of its resources and that none of them are being wasted.
2. It becomes difficult for an organization to maintain its records when they grow. The record retention schedule never allows the growth of the records to go unrestrained.
3. Every company has its own record-keeping policies to ensure that records are held and maintained effectively. A record retention schedule can help determine whether the company consistently implements those policies.
4. When records grow in size, the person responsible for holding them finds it very difficult to locate a particular record and then retrieve it. This schedule helps the person recover and locate information.
5. There are many risks associated with not holding the records effectively. All these risks are completely prevented when the record retention schedules are made and used.

A record retention schedule template can ensure proper record-keeping. Due to its effectiveness, many people consider it an essential tool.

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