RETIRE / ARCHIVE

Remove obsolete information from active use while keeping what still needs an audit trail.

Cleaning out the filing cabinet, you find four homeowner's insurance policies. One is active. The other three expired years ago, but they look nearly identical, and last spring, during the burst-pipe panic, you spent 20 minutes reading coverage limits from a policy that ended in 2022. The old paper was not neutral clutter. It actively competed with the truth.

Retire or archive means removing obsolete information from active use while preserving what still needs an audit trail. The cue is a stale version that an ordinary person could mistake for the live one. The operation has three steps. Identify the current version and mark it with a date. Move superseded copies out of the active location entirely, into an archive if they carry legal, tax, or historical value, or out of existence if not. Point anything that referenced the old version at the new one. When it works, the emergency folder holds exactly one policy, and grabbing it takes seconds instead of forensics. The spec flags both failure directions: deleting invoices right after reconciliation can violate retention rules and weaken an audit defense, while archiving too eagerly, like filing away an abnormal lab result because symptoms faded, can bury a trend that still matters.