Retention and Deletion What happens when you delete something, what is kept deliberately, and what happens to a workspace after cancellation.

Deleting is rarely as simple as removing a row, and the places where it is not are deliberate.

Soft Delete

Most records are marked deleted rather than removed. They disappear from lists and searches, and can be recovered.

That is what makes an accidental deletion survivable — the alternative is a support conversation about something that no longer exists.

What Is Never Simply Deleted

Some records are referenced by others, and removing them would break the record that points at them.

Employees are archived, not deleted. Attendance, payslips, approvals and signed documents all reference the person. A leaver becomes terminated and settled; the record stays. See Offboarding in the Human Resources section.

Anything financial — invoices, payslips, settlements — is retained. In most jurisdictions you are legally required to keep them for years, and the requirement is usually longer than instinct suggests.

The audit trail is a record. If it could be edited or cleared it would be worthless.

Signed documents keep their audit history. A contract whose signing trail could be deleted would not be evidence of anything.

What You Should Delete

The counterpart nobody thinks about:

• Exports. They carry your data with every protection stripped off. Delete them when the purpose is served. See Getting Your Data Out.
• Superseded documents, once the current version is acknowledged.
• Old candidate applications, within whatever retention period applies where you hire. Indefinite retention is a default nobody chose.

After Cancellation

Access ends when the paid period does. The workspace is retained for a period after that, so a cancellation that was accidental or reconsidered can be undone — then it is removed.

Come back inside that window and the workspace is restored rather than rebuilt. Outside it, you would start fresh, which is why exporting before cancelling matters. See Changing or Cancelling.

On self-hosted, none of this applies to your data: cancelling ends the licence, not your database.

Setting Your Own Rules

The platform does not enforce your retention policy — it cannot know what your jurisdiction requires of you. Deciding the periods and holding to them is yours:

1. Decide the period for each kind of record, with advice where it is regulated.
2. Write it down as a policy people have acknowledged. See Policies and Acknowledgements.
3. Diarise the review. Retention that nobody revisits is retention that never happens.

Common Questions

I deleted something by mistake. Most things are recoverable. Ask promptly rather than working around it.

Can we permanently delete a customer's data? There is a process for it, and it interacts with records you may be required to keep. Ask us rather than assuming either way.

How long is the post-cancellation window? Long enough to reconsider. Ask us for the current period rather than relying on a page that may go stale.

Does deleting a record delete its audit entries? No. The trail records that it existed and that it was deleted.