Creating a report retention plan

Do you need to make sure that financial reports for the past several years are available for your auditors? Do you get calls from users asking for a copy of a report because they’ve lost theirs? Is your desk piled high with daily statistics reports making it difficult to find the exact information you need?

If so, Robot/REPORTS can make your life easier. Robot/REPORTS puts your report retention plan into action! It helps you automate the processes that store the reports electronically (using disk, tape, or optical storage) and makes sure reports can be retrieved easily when you need them.

Robot/REPORTS uses the idea of creating a report “archive” to carry out your report retention plan. To develop a good “archive strategy,” you need to do some research. For example, you should:

• Become familiar with the audit requirements of regulations that affect your organization. Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and Payment Card Industry (PCI) regulations are examples of standards that must be followed by various industries. All have different reporting requirements and retention periods for reports. Get to know them.
• Become familiar with the distribution of reports within your organization.
• Talk to the people who receive the reports. They are the ones who can tell you how often they refer to their reports and how long they need to be kept.

Once you have a good picture of how many reports are being created, how often they are being used, and what the legal requirements are for keeping them, you are ready to build your archiving process. Robot/REPORTS lets you set up different plans for different reports.

First, take a look at reports that need to be accessible for day-to-day operations. These are working reports with up-to-date information that are used and then tossed at the end of the day or end of the week. Set up these reports to stay online for seven to 14 days and then delete them. If the information on these reports is summarized at month end and not needed once the information on them is out of date, set them up for archiving as shown in the panel below:

Next, take a look at the daily reports that are needed throughout the month until your month-end processing has completed and the daily information is summarized. These reports generally should be archived for 45 days, or until the summary is available and the detail is not needed.

To save disk space on your system, you can move some of the reports to short-term storage throughout the month. When you move reports to short-term storage, Robot/REPORTS compresses them and copies them to a save file. Report recipients can restore reports from this type of short-term storage to view or print it on demand. The report archive panel for this kind of setup may look something like this:

Some month-end reports must be archived to long-term storage to meet regulatory or other needs for historical data. Here’s an example of how you might set up archiving for a report that needs to be kept for seven years:

Once you have set up your archiving strategy for your reports, be sure to run the Robot/REPORTS archiving command, REPARCHIVE, regularly. You can run it from the Control Menu or schedule it to run using Robot/SCHEDULE. The command has parameters that affect how the archiving is processed:

• REPARCHIVE STAGE(SHORTTERM) checks the dates and moves reports from online to short-term when it is appropriate. Reports that are moved are automatically compressed and copied to save files. Run this command daily or at least weekly. Report recipients can restore reports from short-term to online storage to view or print the report, usually without operator intervention.
• REPARCHIVE STAGE(LONGTERM) checks the dates and moves reports from online or short-term storage to tape or optical storage (off-line storage). Run this command weekly. Long-term storage allows you to retrieve reports fairly quickly, but conserves disk space. Report recipients can request that reports be restored from long-term storage, however, the Operations staff generally must mount a tape or platter to perform the restore operation. Report recipients need to understand that there is a manual step involved in restoring a report from long-term storage.
• REPARCHIVE STAGE(BOTH) checks the dates for both short-term and long-term archive and moves the reports to the proper stage. (You might want to schedule this command weekly instead of the REPARCHIVE STAGE(LONGTERM) parameter.)

  
   

• REPARCHIVE STAGE(EXPIRED) removes reports from the system that have an online archive period that has expired. You should run this command nightly after your report processing has completed.

Refer to the Operations Checklist in the Robot/REPORTS Administrator’s Guide for more extensive explanations of the archiving commands and recommendations for managing your report archive.

Archive dates are stored with the report file. You can check them through the Report History Menu.

Once you have your report archive set up, you easily can find the monthly report that the auditors are asking for, or the daily report that used to hide in the stacks of paper on your desk. And, once recipients become familiar with online report viewing, there are no more lost reports!

Contributed by Pat Cameron, Technical Training Consultant