We have had Laserfiche for years, but I am just getting around to trying to apply our retention policy, and I just can't figure out the best way to accomplish this, or rather, I think I'm missing some key information/concepts.
When Laserfiche was set up for our organization, it was very simplified and not too effective. I have been working for the last few years to automate a ton of tasks, standardize our naming conventions, creating auto-naming workflows and just trying to clean it up and make it more user friendly.
Unfortunately, every time I try to cut off any records, I find myself needing to make a change to a field or a workflow and I have to un-cut stuff off in order to clean up the data in our repository and standardize our fields - remove redundant ones, etc.
What I am having trouble with is how to apply cut off to folders? If I apply an event date to make it eligible for cut off in the future, it still freezes the folder, even if the event has not yet occurred. Also, if I have a set of files that are eligible for cutoff at 7/1/16 and I want to hold them for 3 years after that, I cannot apply the cutoff because maybe we have not yet scanned and submitted everything for that time period yet. I will have to keep that folder un-cut off and open for the next 2 years to make sure that all stragglers have been submitted, and then cut it off, and then start the retention period, but now I am holding everything for 5 years instead of 3.
Also, I am trying to lump these together by year since I have to manually cut off the folders. This makes it so I have a ton of documents in one folder - if anything else needs to be submitted, I would have to un-cut off hundreds of files to file just one more. If I file them on a more granular level, like by month or by date, then I have hundreds upon hundreds of individual cut offs to apply, which is very inefficient.
I just had the idea of creating a workflow that will run quarterly and search for certain file types that I broke out into 3, 5 and 7 year retentions. Anything that it finds that has a date in the metadata that makes it eligible for one of those destruction periods, it will route to one of those folders. Within my 3 year retention folder I have year folders, so at the end of that year it will be eligible for destruction - as a way to minimize the cutoffs that I have to apply.
I feel like I'm missing something though. Should there be an easier way to do this? How are other people doing this? How do you deal with cutting something off and continuing to file documents that need to route to a cut off folder? Are we unique in that we don't file everything exactly on time? How is your "back end" set up so that you don't run into these issues, or so that you optimize the process of applying cut-offs?
Thank you for any insight!