Industries
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Retention periods, naming conventions and approval chains differ by sector, and a generic configuration satisfies none of them. Each page below names the regulations that apply in that industry, gives a starting folder taxonomy, a worked approval workflow and the retention periods commonly required.
What changes between one sector and the next
The taxonomy
Whether documents are organised by matter, asset, consignment, batch or record class. This is the decision that is hardest to change later.
Mandatory metadata
Which fields cannot be left blank — consignment reference, matter number, batch number, asset reference — because they are what makes retrieval possible.
Approval thresholds
Who must approve what, and at what value or risk level a second approver is added.
The retention trigger
What event starts the clock. Creation, closure, expiry, end of production, end of relationship, or the subject reaching the age of majority.
At a glance
The driving regulation and retention trigger by sector
| Industry | Primary regulatory driver | What starts the retention clock |
|---|---|---|
| Healthcare | HIPAA Security Rule — technical safeguards (45 CFR §164.312) | Later of creation date or the date it was last in effect |
| Financial services | SEC Rule 17a-4 (Exchange Act records preservation) | Creation, or the end of the fiscal year in some cases |
| Legal | Duty of confidentiality and legal professional privilege | Matter closure |
| Pharma & life sciences | FDA 21 CFR Part 11 (electronic records; electronic signatures) | Batch expiry or QP certification |
| Government | Freedom of information and public records access | Not applicable — permanent preservation |
| Construction & engineering | ISO 19650 information management | Practical completion or final certificate |
| Manufacturing | ISO 9001:2015 control of documented information (clause 7.5) | End of production and service for the part |
| Energy & utilities | Safety case and permit-to-work regimes | Decommissioning |
| Logistics | Customs recordkeeping obligations | End of the year in which the declaration was accepted |
| Education | Student record access rights — FERPA (US) and UK GDPR / GDPR | Subject reaching the age of majority |
The regulations and retention periods referenced across these pages are starting points drawn from the common position in each sector. Confirm them against the territories and registrations you actually operate under before you rely on them — nothing on this site is legal advice.
Configurations
Ten industry configurations
Healthcare document management
Healthcare organisations hold two very different kinds of document, and conflating them is the root of most compliance problems. Clinical records about identifiable patients carry the heaviest obligations: recorded access, minimum-necessary disclosure and retention periods set by state law rather than by federal rule.
Read the healthcare configurationFinancial services document management
Financial services is the sector where document requirements are written as rules rather than principles. Most industries decide their own retention periods from a risk assessment; broker-dealers, investment advisers and banks are told what to keep, for how long, in what format, and how quickly they must produce it.
Read the financial services configurationLegal document management
Legal document management is organised around the matter, not the author or the department. That single structural difference drives everything else: permissions follow matter teams, retention follows matter closure, conflicts checks operate on matter membership, and a document’s meaning is inseparable from the matter it belongs to.
Read the legal configurationPharma & life sciences document management
Life sciences is the sector with the strictest electronic records requirements of any we work with, and the one where a document system itself becomes an object of inspection. Under FDA 21 CFR Part 11 and EU GMP Annex 11, the system holding your batch records is not neutral infrastructure — it must be validated, its audit trail must be computer-generated and unalterable, and its electronic signatures must be provably linked to the records they apply to..
Read the pharma & life sciences configurationGovernment document management
Public sector document management is dominated by two obligations that pull in opposite directions. Disclosure law requires you to find and release records to anyone who asks, within a statutory deadline.
Read the government configurationConstruction & engineering document management
Construction document management is a revision-control problem before it is anything else. Work built to a superseded drawing is the single most expensive documentation failure available on a site, and it happens through an entirely mundane sequence: a revision is issued, someone is working from a printout, and nothing in the process makes the difference visible.
Read the construction & engineering configurationManufacturing document management
Manufacturing document management turns on a single question that an auditor will ask in some form on every visit: was the document the operator used the current approved one? Everything else — change control, training records, supplier documentation — exists to make the answer to that question reliably yes. A repository that stores documents well but cannot evidence which revision was in use on a given shift has not solved the problem..
Read the manufacturing configurationEnergy & utilities document management
Energy and utilities document management follows the asset, and the asset outlives everything around it — the project that built it, the contractor that commissioned it, the software that documented it, and usually the people who understood it. A substation or a pipeline commissioned in the 1980s is still operating, and the commissioning records still matter when it is modified.
Read the energy & utilities configurationLogistics document management
Logistics document management is a capture problem before it is a storage problem. The documents that decide whether a claim succeeds — a signed delivery note, a damage photograph, a temperature log, a customs declaration — are produced away from any office, by drivers and warehouse staff, on a phone, often in poor conditions.
Read the logistics configurationEducation document management
Education document management has to accommodate record types whose sensitivities differ by an order of magnitude, held by one institution and often in one system. An enrolment form, a safeguarding referral, a staff disciplinary file and an accreditation evidence pack all need different permissions, different retention periods and different disclosure treatment.
Read the education configuration
FAQ
Questions about industry configurations
How much does an industry configuration actually differ?
The modules are the same; the configuration is not. What differs is the folder taxonomy, which metadata fields are mandatory, where the approval thresholds sit, and — most consequentially — what event starts each retention clock. A healthcare configuration and a logistics one share every feature and almost no settings.
What if our sector is not listed?
The ten here are where we have the most implementation experience, not the limit of what the product suits. The useful question is which of these your document population most resembles: heavily regulated with recorded-access duties, asset-centred with decades-long retention, or high-volume with short-lived evidential records.
Are the retention periods on these pages usable as a schedule?
No, and each page says so explicitly. They are starting points for a conversation with your counsel or records manager. Retention varies by jurisdiction, entity type and circumstance, is extended for minors in several sectors, and is displaced entirely by a legal hold.
Which industries have the strictest document requirements?
Pharmaceuticals and life sciences, by a clear margin — 21 CFR Part 11 and EU GMP Annex 11 require a validated system with a computer-generated, unalterable audit trail retained at least as long as the records. Financial services is next, because SEC Rule 17a-4 constrains the storage medium itself.
Can one tenant serve several sectors?
Yes. Retention rules attach per record class rather than per tenant, and branch separation keeps entities apart under central administration. A group operating a manufacturing arm and a logistics arm applies different taxonomies and periods in the same system.
Related routes into the product
- Use cases by processContracts, policies, invoices, HR records, QMS and ISO 27001.
- Platform overviewThe ten modules every industry configuration draws on.
- Records managementWhere retention triggers are configured and disposition reviewed.
- Retention policy guideHow to build a schedule with defensible trigger events.
- Retention schedule templateA starting schedule to adapt to your record classes.
- Request a demoConfigured around your taxonomy and one of your retention rules.
آخر مراجعة: 2026-09-01