Special Report
Retention Scheduling:
Importance of Retention Schedules

Retention scheduling projects are rarely ever fully completed. They often take longer to complete than the individuals assigned to the project remain on the same job.

Completing a retention schedule project is little like painting the Golden Gate Bridge. For example, by the time the bridge is completely painted at one end, it is time to begin to paint the other end.

Even when the assignment is "completed", the schedule typically omits a wide variety of media, such as video, film and magnetic. A complete retention schedule should be in the range of 300 line items.

The values assigned to the line items in a retention schedule are the only quantitative measure of the importance of the information to the enterprise. The importance of these values are most often lost on the individuals responsible for the design of the systems. The assigned values are intended to identify the useful life-cycle of the record as determined by its use as information or to comply with legal requirements.

Without an enforceable retention schedule, which means that only "official" records are archived, approximately 60% of the records sent to archives are typically redundant (informational copies) and need not be archived. This equates to 60% of the storage costs, which in many cases, is more than sufficient to warrant maintaining a current retention schedule.

The lack of uniform terminology can result in something as common as "checks" being described in over 25 different ways, each description having its own individual retention value. It is estimated that over 90% of the legal retention values are between 3 to 4 years after a particular event. (i.e., final audit, completed, superseded, etc.)