Guides / Glossary
Records retention glossary
The words you’ll meet when you decide how long records stay and who can see them, each in a line or two, with what it will mean in folio.
- Custodian
- The person who looks after a set of records day to day, and who’ll be told in writing when a legal hold covers them. What is a legal hold?
- Disposal
- What will happen to a record at the end of its retention period: it’s destroyed, returned or passed on. In folio, disposal will happen when a record’s class ends, and each one will go in the ledger. Retention classes
- Ledger
- In folio, the ledger will be the running history of your records: each filing, view, change, hold and disposal, with who did it and the reason given. The ideas behind folio
- Legal hold
- An instruction that will stop records being disposed of, by a schedule or by anyone, while a claim, an investigation or a request is open. In folio, releasing one will take two people. What is a legal hold?
- Limitation period
- The time someone has to bring a claim. In England and Wales it’s six years from when the cause of action accrued for a claim in contract, under section 5 of the Limitation Act 1980. Limitation Act 1980, section 5
- Matter
- A piece of work a law firm does for a client, usually with its own number. In folio, everything on a matter will sit in one folder. folio for law firms
- Record
- A document you have to keep, together with what’s known about it: when it was filed, its class and its history. In folio, the record will be what’s kept, held and accounted for. The ideas behind folio
- Retention class
- In folio, a named rule for one kind of record: how long it will be kept, the date the period will count from, and whether it will be Retained or Locked. Retention classes
- Retention period
- How long a record should stay before it goes, and the event the period counts from, such as the end of a tenancy or of a tax year. How long to keep tenancy records
- Retention schedule
- A written list of the kinds of record an organisation has, how long each should stay and what happens at the end. It’s where your retention classes will come from. Writing an HR schedule
- Subject access request
- A request from a person for a copy of the personal data you have about them, under Article 15 of UK GDPR. Answering a request
- Time-stamp
- A time-stamp from an outside authority will show that a fingerprint of a file existed at a given moment. folio will time-stamp each receipt and the ledger, so the dates won’t rest on our word. How we’ll keep it safe
- Write-once
- Locked records in folio will be write-once: nobody, including you and us, will be able to change or delete one before its retention ends. Retained records won’t be, and that’s the difference between the two. Retained and Locked
Read the guides
How long to keep client files and accounting, HR and tenancy records, with the law behind each period.