Records Management Editing and Proofreading Services

An organisation keeps everything or throws away the wrong thing, and both failures come from the same document. The retention schedule is the piece of writing that decides, years in advance, what survives — and when it is vague, the practical outcome is that nobody deletes anything, storage grows without limit, and a request for disclosure produces four hundred thousand documents nobody can review.

We edit what records managers and information governance teams produce — retention schedules and disposal authorities, information asset registers and data maps, records management policies and procedures, classification and file plan documentation, digital preservation and format migration policies, archive transfer and appraisal documentation, legal hold and disposal suspension procedures, storage, transfer and access procedures, disposal certification and audit trail documentation, staff guidance and desk instructions, system migration and decommissioning records plans, and governance and compliance reporting. Our editors work on the schedule everything else depends on.

The retention schedule fails on its trigger events far more often than on its periods, and the distinction matters because a period is arithmetic and a trigger is a judgement someone has to make. "Seven years" is meaningless without seven years from what — creation, closure, the end of the contract, the last transaction, the end of the relationship, or the individual's death. We write these so every entry states its trigger as an event that is observable in a system rather than known only to a person who has left; so the trigger's owner is named, since "when the matter closes" requires someone to record that the matter has closed and most schedules never say who; so the record class is described by what it contains rather than by the folder it currently sits in, because reorganisations outlive schedules; so the disposal action is specific — destroy, transfer to archive, review again in five years — and the review option is used sparingly, as a schedule full of reviews defers every decision indefinitely; and so the relationship between the schedule and legal holds is written out, given that a hold must reliably override an automated deletion and normally does so through a documented step nobody has tested. Schedules written this way get applied, which is the only property that matters.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including schedules, asset registers and organisational information. We are editors rather than records, information governance or legal advisers, and we offer no view on retention periods, obligations or disposal decisions. What we can do is make each entry precise enough to act on without asking anyone.