Glossary
Records management
Also called: records retention, information governance
Records management governs how long a document is kept and what happens at the end of that period. It is narrower than document management, which covers a document's whole lifecycle, and it is where the legal obligations concentrate — retention schedules, disposition and legal holds.
Records management explained
Records management versus document management
Document management is about the whole life of a document: capture, versioning, approval, retrieval. Records management is about one part of it — how long the document is kept, on what authority, and what happens when that period ends.
The distinction matters commercially because many products do the first well and the second barely, and the second is where the legal exposure sits.
What a retention schedule contains
For each class of record: a period, a trigger event that starts the clock, and a disposition action. The trigger is the part organisations most often omit, and its absence makes a schedule unimplementable. "Seven years" is meaningless without saying seven years from what — creation, closure, contract termination, end of employment, or the end of the financial year in which the record was closed.
Why disposition review beats automatic deletion
Retention periods are judgements about legal exposure made years before the expiry date, and circumstances change. A timer that destroys records will eventually destroy one you needed, and automated destruction cannot evidence who authorised it — which is precisely what you will be asked.
Raising a review costs minutes and converts an irreversible automated action into a defensible human decision with a name attached.
The measure of a records programme
Not how many records are correctly classified, but how many are not. Records with no retention class assigned are the honest measure of programme completeness, and they are the ones that turn into an unbounded archive nobody is willing to delete.
FAQ
Records management: common questions
Is every document a record?
No, and treating them as identical over-governs working material. A record is a document retained as evidence of an activity or obligation; a draft, a working copy or a personal note generally is not, and forcing everything through records controls makes people avoid the system.
Who should own the retention schedule?
One named person, with authority to decide. A schedule owned by a committee is a schedule nobody updates, and the most common failure mode in records management is not a wrong period but an unmaintained one.
Related terms
- Audit trailAn audit trail is an append-only record of every action taken on a document — views, downloads, edits, approvals, permission changes and deletions — with the acting user, timestamp and affected version.
- Chain of custodyChain of custody is the documented, unbroken record of who has held, accessed or altered an item of evidence, and when.
- DispositionDisposition is what happens to a record when its retention period expires: destruction, transfer to an archive, or a decision to extend.
- Document controlDocument control is the discipline of ensuring only approved documents are in use, superseded ones cannot be mistaken for current, and every change is authorised and recorded.
- Information governanceInformation governance is the framework of accountability, policies and controls determining how an organisation creates, uses, retains and disposes of its information.
- Legal holdA legal hold suspends the routine destruction of records that may be relevant to litigation, an investigation or an audit.
آخر مراجعة: 28 أغسطس 2026. Browse the full glossary.