Keep what you must,
clear out the rest

A usable schedule answers four questions for every record type: what it covers, how long it is kept, which date starts the count, and what happens at the end (destroy, transfer to an archive, or review again). Most schedules state the period clearly and leave the starting date vague, and that gap is why they are rarely applied.

Write the starting date as an event you can find on a document: “after the tax year the return covers”, “after the last day of employment”, “after the contract ends”. If you cannot point to the document that holds the date, nobody will be able to apply the rule later either.

File dates on a computer show when a file was saved or copied, which says nothing about retention. Put the date that starts the clock at the front of the name, with a short word for what kind of date it is: Left-2019-06-30, Ended-2021-08-31, Inv-2018-11-04. Sorting a folder then lines records up in the order they become eligible.

Some teams go one step further and file records into a folder for the year they become eligible, such as “Review in 2027”. It makes the yearly review a single folder, at the cost of having to calculate the year up front. Either way, the date has to come from the document, not from memory.

Periods come from tax rules, employment law, industry regulators, insurers and your own contracts, and they differ by country and state. As one example, the IRS says business records should generally be kept for at least three years after a return is filed, employment tax records for at least four, and longer in some situations. Your accountant or lawyer should confirm the periods for your own schedule.

A legal hold overrides every period. If a dispute, investigation or audit is expected, the related records must be kept until the hold is lifted, even if the schedule says they could go. Keep held files in a clearly marked place and leave them out of every disposal list.

The traditional answer is a yearly clear-out: a shred day for paper and a weekend of deleting folders that look old. It is quick, but it is based on folder dates and guesswork, and it rarely leaves a record of what was removed or why.

Some teams keep a spreadsheet of archive boxes or folders with a destroy-after date, and others rely on storage quotas to force the issue. Filex gives you the missing piece for digital files: the starting date read from each document and a list you can review, so the clear-out follows the schedule and you can show it did.

Filex does not delete files on a schedule, set retention periods, or tell you how long the law requires you to keep anything. It does not know about a legal hold unless you keep held files apart and tell it. It reads dates and builds lists; deleting is something you do after checking them.

It only finds a starting date that is written in the document. A file with no date on it, or with several possible dates, will need a person to decide which one counts.