A practical retention policy in one afternoon

Most retention policy projects die the same way: someone proposes a full document audit, legal wants to review every category, and six months later there's a 40-page PDF nobody has read. Meanwhile the actual documents keep piling up with no rules attached to them at all.

You can get 80% of the value in an afternoon by ignoring the exhaustive version and starting with the handful of categories that carry real risk or real storage cost.

Start with five buckets, not fifty

Nearly every organization's documents sort into a small set of retention profiles. Financial records — invoices, receipts, tax filings — typically need 7 years in the US to satisfy IRS recordkeeping expectations. Signed contracts usually get kept for the life of the relationship plus a set number of years after termination, often 3 to 7 depending on your industry and any statute of limitations that applies. Employee records have their own rules that vary by state and by document type — I-9 forms, for example, need to be kept for 3 years after hire or 1 year after termination, whichever is later. Marketing assets and internal drafts, meanwhile, often don't need formal retention at all — they need an expiration date so they stop cluttering search results.

Write down your five (or six, or seven) buckets on one page before you touch a single folder. Resist the urge to make bucket six for that one weird exception. It can wait.

Assign, don't audit

The instinct is to review every existing document before applying a policy. Don't. Apply retention rules going forward to your major categories today, and let a script or your document platform tag historical files by folder or document type in bulk. You'll misclassify a small percentage. That's fine — a retention policy that covers 90% of documents starting this week beats a perfect one that starts next quarter.

Automate the disposition, review the exceptions

The last step is the one most policies skip entirely: actually setting expiration or review dates that trigger something, instead of leaving retention as a paragraph in a document nobody opens. In FileEazy, this is a per-category rule that flags files for review or archival automatically when they hit their retention date, with a hold option for anything under legal review. The policy stops being a PDF and starts being something that happens to your files without a person remembering to do it manually.