Apply a retention policy

A retention policy captures how long a document must be kept (e.g. seven years for invoices, one year for application drafts) and what should happen when that period expires (delete, archive, anonymise). Attaching a policy to a document hands the lifecycle to DocuDesk: it schedules the review date, surfaces upcoming expirations on the dashboard, and runs the configured action when the timer fires.

Goal

By the end you will have picked a retention policy from the instance library, attached it to one document, and verified that DocuDesk recorded the review-and-delete date.

Prerequisites

• You have completed Upload a document.
• The instance has at least one retention policy defined (admins manage these in Settings → DocuDesk → Retention policies).

Steps

1. Open the document detail view and click Apply retention policy in the action bar.

   

2. The dialog shows every retention policy defined on this instance. Each row carries the duration, the expiration action (delete / anonymise / archive) and a description so you can pick the right one for this document.

   

3. Submit. DocuDesk attaches the policy to the document, computes the Review date from the policy's duration plus today, and writes it to the document object.

   

4. Open the dashboard's Upcoming expirations tile. Documents whose review date is within the next 30 days are listed here, sorted by date — making it easy to plan the review pass before the automatic action fires.

   

Verification

You are done when: the document detail view shows a Retention badge with the review date, the document object's retentionPolicyId and reviewAt fields are populated in OpenRegister, and the dashboard's Upcoming expirations tile (after 30 days) includes the document.

Common issues

Symptom	Fix
Policy picker is empty	No retention policies are defined on this instance — ask an admin to create one in Settings → DocuDesk → Retention policies.
Wrong policy attached, can it be changed?	Yes — re-run Apply retention policy and pick the right one; the new policy overwrites the previous attachment (and updates the review date).
Review date in the past after applying	The chosen policy's duration is shorter than the document's age (e.g. one year policy on a two-year-old document). DocuDesk surfaces this as a Review now badge; the expiration action will fire on the next scheduled run.

Reference

• Document register feature — where the retention fields live on the Document object.
• Configuration management — how admins define retention policies on the instance.