Companies must keep certain documents for a period of time as prescribed by law. For data protection reasons, documents must then be deleted as quickly and securely as possible. This even applies to documents like invoices. Here’s how to automate this process with the help of DocuWare retention and deletion rules.
Legal retention periods regulate the period of time that documents of a varying types need be archived in a very orderly manner. The duration depends on the type of business document in question, among other things.
Contents:
- Automate deletion with DocuWare rules
- Define deletion criteria
- Define routine
- Time difference cannot be forgotten
- High security level
Automate deletion with DocuWare rules
In order to remove documents from your file cabinets at the right time, you need to define so-called deletion rules. This ensures that your company will comply with all retention periods as legally required and that documents are not accidentally deleted at the wrong time – or maybe even the wrong documents.
Settings for this are found in DocuWare configuration under Deletion Rules. To see this area, you‘ll need the Configure deletion rules function, which is assigned in configuration under User Management.
Define deletion criteria
On the Policy tab, first select the file cabinet for which you want to define the deletion rule. Now define the criteria for which documents should be deleted and when.
The rules are always based on index or system entries. In our example, it is the index entry for the document type Incoming Invoice.
So if you have selected the Store Date field as the basis, you can choose between years, hours, days or months. If necessary, add other criteria, for example "Invoice" as the document type.
By the way, a document that is currently being processed cannot be deleted. So make sure that all documents have previously been given a status in which access is only possible for the administrator. The status can be called "Ready for deletion," for example. This is easy to set up with Autoindex.
Define routine
Now determine when the schedule should start and at what rhythm it should be executed. This can be precisely adjusted from a monthly pace to a minute level.
If you only want to be able to initiate the deletion process of a stored rule manually, simply set the schedule to "Never."
Time difference cannot be forgotten
A deletion rule always displays the time it was executed for the time zone in which the rule was created. If you have selected a different time zone on Windows, you will see a list from which you can determine your time zone.
High security level
Finally, you can specify which users should have the right to execute the deletion rule. It is advisable to only assign administrators for this, because the deletion of documents should be treated with a high level of security.
Also more on how you can easily view the lifecycle of a document.