Keeping Them Long Enough

Clock data is bulky. A site of five hundred people generates something like half a million punch events a year, plus the audit trail, which is larger.

The practical lesson in “Keeping Them Long Enough” is that a timesheet only becomes reliable through a process people can operate consistently. For teams exploring fte meaning, see the complete product overview can add time and project context, provided collection is proportionate, access is limited and every consequential inference receives human review.

So retention gets set short, by an administrator managing a database, from a default that came with the product. It is almost never set from an obligation, and the obligation is usually longer.

For a separate benchmark relevant to “Keeping Them Long Enough”, consult the Basecamp Shape Up guide. Use it to test record quality, approvals, retention, employee rights and exception handling against the real workflow rather than treating a software report as self-explanatory evidence.

What drives the required period

Statutory working-time record-keeping duties, which in most jurisdictions require retention for a period measured in years.

Pay and tax records, which are usually longer.

The limitation period for a claim about unpaid wages, which in several places reaches back years and in some can reach much further for a series of deductions.

Sector requirements: driver hours, safety-critical roles, regulated care, and anything with a licence condition.

And any contract or funding agreement that specifies a period.

Take the longest, apply it to everything, and record which obligation set it. Without that last part somebody will shorten it in three years to save storage.

The audit trail specifically

Frequently given a shorter retention than the records, because it is the larger of the two.

That is exactly backwards. The records without the audit trail cannot be explained, and an unexplainable record is weaker than no record at all in most of the situations where it is produced.

Set them to the same period. The storage cost of a few years of audit data is trivial against the cost of one dispute that cannot be answered.

Paper

The fallback sheets described earlier in this collection are original records and should be retained for the same period as the electronic ones.

They are routinely entered and discarded, which leaves manual entries in the system with nothing behind them. Scanning them at the point of entry costs seconds and solves it.

Migration, which is where it is actually lost

Systems get replaced every five to ten years. The migration carries the current state of the records and, in a very large proportion of cases, does not carry the audit trail, because mapping it is hard and nobody put it in the requirements.

Export the audit trail before any migration, in a readable format, and keep it with the migrated data. One line in a migration plan, and it is the most common way organisations lose the ability to explain their own history.

The same applies to a vendor change: data in a format only the old product reads is data you have for as long as you have a licence for the old product.

Deletion requests

Where individuals have erasure rights, time records are frequently in scope of a request and frequently exempt, because there is a legal obligation to keep them and a legitimate interest in defending claims.

The exemption is real and not automatic. It has to be assessed and recorded for the particular records, and the parts not needed for the retained purpose — free-text notes, location data captured incidentally, biometric templates after the person leaves — may well have to go even where the hours stay.

Biometric templates are the one to look at hardest. Retaining them for a leaver is difficult to justify under any analysis, and deleting them on exit should be a step in the leaver process rather than a periodic clean-up.

The check

Find the retention setting for punches, for the audit trail and for paper. Find the obligation each was set from.

Three settings, three sources. On most sites at least one of the three settings has no source behind it at all, and the audit trail is the one.

Retention is not the same as accessibility

Data kept in a system nobody can log into, in a format no current tool reads, or on a server that has been decommissioned, satisfies a retention policy and answers no questions.

The test is whether a specific week from four years ago can actually be produced, with its corrections, in a readable form. Running that once a year on a random week is the only check that distinguishes retention from storage, and it is the check that finds the migration that dropped the audit trail while nobody was looking at it.