Question

Creating an Event

Records Management

Updated June 21, 2022

asked on August 2, 2017 • Show version history

I seem to be missing a key element to creating an event. In Admin console I go to Cutoff Instructions, create new, select type Event and then I add events. It seems though, that the events are just text, they are just descriptions and I cannot figure out how to tie them to anything - like a metadata field.

For example, we retain service provider contracts in our system. Some of our contracts are for a year, some are ongoing for 10 or 20 years. We save them for 7 years after they are closed out. I need that closed date to be a trigger for eligibility to be cut off, but I cannot figure out how to correlate that piece of metadata with an event.

Or really how to make a cutoff event meaningful at all - it allows me to type whatever text in there. I could write that it requires rainbows and unicorns and that would be an event - but it doesn't correlate to anything in my data.

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replied on June 21, 2022

Did either of you come up with any more information or find a way to use the Event field in a meaningful way? I was hoping to set a retention period for folders based on a date that is set in a metadata field (for this example, let's just say date of hire, + a time period, again for example let's say 4 years.
So any file the folder with this retention period assigned would be deleted 4 years after the hire date.
I'm not getting anywhere with this, and it seems a pretty basic request. Has anyone been able to successfully use this functionality the way I'm trying to? The key piece seems to be to link "events" to a date provided in a metadata field.

AltInstructions.PNG (33.88 KB)

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replied on August 2, 2017

Hi Danielle,

You're correct that the event could be anything. It's basically an instruction to the user who can set that it has occurred at the appropriate time.

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replied on August 2, 2017

Hm, because I had this set to an event, but we were unable to perform any cutoffs. We had to change this to a time based cut off and were then able to perform a cut off.

I guess I do not understand how the event works or what the point of it is. Even though the document had met the criteria for the event, it would not allow me to cut off anything that was event based. I had to change it to a time based cutoff before I was able to perform cutoff on any records.

Anything that is assigned as event based does not give me the option to perform a cut off. How would I assign an event and then determine that the event has happened? Or be able to cut off a record if we were to use event based cutoff instruction? Or should I just not use this feature because I clearly do not understand the point of it? :)

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replied on August 2, 2017

Did you set both events, or just one of them? I notice you have 'cutoff eligibility requires all events' in your screenshots, if you just want to trigger based off of one event you should set it to 'cutoff eligibility requires any events' in the cutoff instruction. Otherwise, make sure the event has occurred in the past - if it's in the future, the record folder won't be eligible for cutoff until the event date.

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replied on August 2, 2017

Oh, I think I found the event date at the folder level. We don't want to set event dates at the folder level though, because that closes it off and makes it inaccessible to more files, and then things cannot file appropriately.

I guess I was looking for a way to do it dynamically or on a file by file basis. Or just looking for where to set the date - found it - but that doesn't work for our needs. Thank you for the clarification.

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replied on March 26, 2018 • Show version history

Hi Danielle, I am interested to find out more about how you decided to approach event-driven retention. We are at the initial stages of TRM implementation and we are trying to decide which cutoff instructions to use for anything that is event driven, how that ties in with our metadata fields, etc. Sometimes I almost feel that we could just use a simple time-based cut-off to drive event-driven retention. For example, we could have a 2018 folder for all records where the event happened in 2018, put a filing date of December 31, 2018 and cut-off on January 1, 2019? I have been reading about event-driven retention and how we would want to keep a folder open without setting all the events until we are ready to cut off the folder and that sounds very similar to what is done when we apply the time-based retention. I agree, C + ... and E + ... aren't exactly the same, but, at the end of the day retention schedules specify minimum retention periods that we are to keep records for, and it looks to me that in this case we could wait until the end of the year before we cut off all the records (for which the event occurred in this year) at the same time. Am I missing something here or is this what others do as well? Also, I am still not clear if there is a way to tie up event descriptions to metadata fields. Have you found an answer to this question? Thank you in advance!

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Creating an Event

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