How should an advice firm handle long-term record keeping?

Treat retention as an explicit, owned responsibility rather than a property of whatever systems you happen to run. Advice records must survive for years, and the way firms lose them is almost never deliberate deletion; it is attrition during a platform migration, a licensee change or a provider changeover where nobody checked what was in the old system.

The obligation itself comes from your licence conditions, your licensee and the relevant law, and this article does not attempt to state it. What it addresses is the technical reality underneath, which is the same regardless of the exact number of years: information that must be retrievable long after the systems that created it have been replaced. Very few small firms have designed for that, because it never becomes urgent until it does.

Start by identifying where records actually live, which is usually more places than expected. The advice platform holds client files and documents. Email holds a substantial amount of correspondence that constitutes a record and is structured by nothing. Document storage holds statements of advice, file notes and signed documents. Possibly a legacy system holds anything predating your current platform. And someone's mailbox or personal drive holds material nobody has filed. That last category is the one that disappears.

The largest risk is change, and every firm goes through it. Migrating to a new advice platform means the old one holds records you must keep, and switching it off without a verified export loses them. Changing licensee can mean losing access to systems you relied on. Changing IT providers means the knowledge of where things are sits with someone who is leaving. In every case the failure is the same: nobody made retention a named step in the transition, so it was assumed by both parties and done by neither.

So make it a step, explicitly, with an owner. Before any system is decommissioned, export what must be retained, verify the export is complete and readable rather than merely present, and store it somewhere that will survive the next change too. Document what was exported, when, and where it now lives. That documentation is worth as much as the data, because in six years nobody will remember and the person who did it may have left.

Email deserves particular attention because it is the least structured and the most likely to vanish. Correspondence that constitutes a record should be filed to the client record rather than left in a mailbox, which is a discipline rather than a technology, though integration between your advice platform and email makes it far more likely to happen. Departing staff mailboxes need reviewing before any retention clock expires, and converting a mailbox to a shared one preserves history without holding a licence.

Backups are related and not the same thing, and conflating them causes trouble. A backup is for recovering from failure and typically has a retention window measured in weeks or months. Long-term record keeping is a different requirement with a different lifespan. A firm that assumes its backup satisfies a seven-year obligation is likely to be wrong, and the discovery usually comes when someone asks for a document from 2019.

Then verify periodically, because retention that has never been tested is an assumption. Once a year, pick a client matter from several years ago and try to retrieve the file, the advice document and the relevant correspondence. If it takes an afternoon and three systems, that is useful information. If it cannot be done at all, that is more useful still, and far better learned during a self-check than during a complaint or a review.

One structural point that makes all of this easier: keep the authoritative copy somewhere you control rather than somewhere a vendor controls. Platforms change and vendors change terms; a structured document store you own, backed up independently, remains yours. That does not mean duplicating everything, and it does mean knowing which copy is the one you would rely on if the platform were unavailable tomorrow.

The honest caveats. This is not advice about your obligations, which are set by your licence and the law rather than by an IT provider. Different firms will reasonably reach different arrangements depending on their platforms and licensee requirements. And retention is genuinely tedious work that never feels urgent, which is precisely why it needs an owner and a date rather than good intentions. If you want yours made explicit and verified, call 1800 456 567.