Records management

What it means

Records management is the system a company uses to register, classify, store and eventually dispose of its documents, both paper and electronic. It covers receiving and logging incoming mail, handling and filing records, their archiving and, at the end, shredding or transfer to an archive.

The rules are set by a records management policy and a retention schedule. The schedule sorts documents into groups, such as accounting documents, contracts, personnel files or correspondence with authorities, and assigns each a retention period and a value mark deciding whether it is destroyed after that period or offered to an archive.

The Slovak Archives and Records Act requires full records management mainly from public authorities and certain designated bodies. For an ordinary private company, however, well-organised records management is a practical necessity, because retention periods flow from many other rules, from accounting to the GDPR.

How it works in practice

We help clients draw up a simple retention schedule that suits their size. Usually a table listing document groups, storage location and retention period is enough. For accounting documents, payroll records or contracts, the periods follow from accounting, tax and employment law.

Much correspondence now arrives electronically, mainly through the electronic mailbox on Slovensko.sk. Records management should ensure these messages are collected regularly, saved outside the mailbox and filed with the right matter, because the mailbox is not a permanent archive.

With electronic records, documents must be reliably retrievable and their integrity preserved, meaning they cannot be altered unnoticed. The Accounting Act requires this for accounting documents, and for electronically signed documents long-term signature validation needs to be considered.

What to watch out for

The most common problem is a company keeping “everything forever” or, conversely, nothing systematically. The first conflicts with the GDPR, which requires personal data to be deleted once the purpose ends; the second means documents that should have been kept are missing at an inspection.

Older documents often go missing when accounting software, the IT provider or the office location changes. Before any such change, check where documents still within their retention period are stored and how the company will access them after the contract with the old provider ends.