You are going to need to stretch your recordkeeping muscles to start using the new section of Common activities within the General retention and disposal schedule (GRDS).
Common activities have been introduced into the GRDS to cover records for activities that could repeat across functions – such as committees, agreements, advice or compensation. This section streamlines the sentencing of records by grouping them together to ensure consistency in retention periods and also means repetition is removed from the document.
But these Common activities don’t just apply to the functions in the GRDS, they can also be applied to your core business records. For example, you could use the Common activities in the GRDS to sentence records on advice that you create as part of your core business. Just keep in mind that you must use your agency or sector schedule for sentencing if you have a business or legislative requirement to keep the records for a different retention period. If you don’t have an agency or sector schedule – and you want to use Common activities or the full GRDS to sentence your core business records – get in touch with us first for advice prior to sentencing.
Why the change?
The idea for Common activities came about as we started to think about new ways to develop retention and disposal schedules. Common activities are undertaken by many different agencies so it makes sense for these to be combined with less repetition of record classes within functions and schedules. You also told us that you liked this model when we consulted with you on revising the GRDS back in 2014/15.
Including Common activities in the GRDS means core retention and disposal schedules can be streamlined and require less time to develop and review. By focussing only on unique, core business activities within specific agency or sector schedules, these schedules will become smaller, simpler and easier to use. Less time spent on developing each individual schedule means:
- QSA has more time to help agencies create core schedules and to improve schedule coverage across Queensland
- more agencies will be able to manage their records efficiently and undertake lawful disposal activities.
We’d love to hear about how you might implement this change, so tell us about your experiences below. We are also looking at Common activities for sector schedules. What do you think? Let us know as there may be further implementation tools and advice we could develop based on your feedback.
For more advice on sentencing records, please visit the QSA website.
Remember, you can contact us via email, telephone (3037 6630), blog or Twitter.
Allison Drechshage
Appraisal Archivist
