What is data retention?

Storage being cheap made keeping everything the default, which is the wrong default for records about people.

Every extra month is extra exposure. A breach reaches whatever you still hold, and a record deleted last year cannot be part of it.

There are real reasons to keep things. Disputes, warranties, tax, and the ordinary business need to remember what was agreed.

The useful question is per record type rather than blanket. A booking confirmation and a full call transcript do not need the same lifespan.

Deletion also has to reach the copies. A record removed from one system while a spreadsheet export of it sits in someone's downloads folder has not really been deleted.

Say you run a plumbing shop that takes about 600 calls a month. Keep everything for five years and you're holding 36,000 transcripts, most of them about a leak that was fixed the same week. A short schedule cuts that pile down.

Recordings go after 30 days, because you only replay audio when a call is disputed, and disputes tend to show up fast. Transcripts go after 90 days, which covers a billing cycle and a follow-up visit. Booking records stay for as long as your warranty and tax paperwork need them. With that schedule in place, a break-in to your account next spring exposes about 1,800 transcripts instead of 36,000.

Write the three lines down with a reason beside each one. "We offer a one-year warranty on labor" is the kind of reason you'll want to point to when a customer asks why something is gone.

Retention has a hard exception, and it catches small businesses out. Once you know about a dispute or a lawsuit, you're generally expected to keep anything related to it, even if your schedule says delete. Lawyers call this a legal hold. If your system purges on a timer, you need a way to exempt one customer's records. Ask any vendor how that works before the day you need it.

Some records also carry minimums set by other people. Tax records and payroll files have their own periods, so check with your accountant before you shorten those. Call transcripts rarely fall into that group.

Then test deletion the dull way. Pick an old test call, delete it, and look for it a week later in search, in exports and in any connected CRM. Finding it in the CRM tells you that your schedule covers one system out of two.

Retention on call records is a setting you control rather than a fixed policy we impose.

Transcripts and summaries are the parts worth reviewing first, since they hold the most detail about the caller.

GreetKeeper carries no certifications, so this is a setting rather than an audited control, and we would rather say that than imply otherwise.