Data Retention & Deletion Schedule Enforcer

The problem this kills

Your retention schedule lives in a binder, a wiki page, or a spreadsheet that nobody opens. Meanwhile records pile up well past the date you were allowed to keep them - old HR files, expired contracts, customer data you should have purged years ago. Every one of those is a liability sitting in your systems waiting for an auditor or a regulator to find it.

So you do the painful manual dance once a year: cross-reference a sprawling inventory against the schedule by hand, hope you remembered every legal hold, and quietly worry that you either deleted something you shouldn't have or kept something you shouldn't have. It's slow, it's error-prone, and there's no clean evidence trail to prove you did it right.

This tool does the cross-referencing for you, every time - and it never deletes anything on its own. It surfaces exactly which records have aged out, blocks anything under a legal hold, and waits for a human to approve each batch before a single record is marked for disposal.

What you'll build

A small, private web app - just for your team - that:

• Stores your retention schedule: each record category, its retention period, the trigger event that starts the clock, the legal basis, and the approved disposal method.
• Loads your record inventory (from a CSV or Google Sheet) with the dates that drive retention.
• Automatically flags records past their retention period by matching each record to its schedule rule and doing the date math for you.
• Checks legal holds first - a held record is never proposed for disposal, no matter how old it is. Legal hold always beats retention.
• Groups eligible records into a proposed disposal batch that the records owner reviews and approves before anything happens.
• Logs certified disposals with a disposal certificate you can keep as evidence.
• Sends Resend email reminders when batches are waiting for review or when records are coming due.
• Exports a disposal-log CSV plus retention-status and disposal certificates for your audit file.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

• It starts by interviewing you about your business. Before it builds anything, the plan has the AI agent ask you a focused set of questions - your record categories, how your retention clock is triggered, the exact column names in your inventory, your legal-hold process, your volumes, and your edge cases - then it reads back a short tailored spec for your thumbs-up. The tool is shaped around how you actually manage records, not a generic template.
• A clear, copy-paste prompt for every build step - you never have to write code.
• The data model for the retention schedule, record inventory, legal holds, disposal batches, and the certified disposal log.
• The retention math and the legal-hold override logic, explained in plain language.
• The approval workflow and the audit trail.
• The "No API yet?" fallback so you can build the whole thing today from a spreadsheet, with a clean CSV export in the exact columns your system of record expects.
• A verification checklist so you know it actually works.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

Compliance tooling is only worth anything if it's defensible. This plan bakes that in:

• Login so only your team can open the tool.
• Row-level security so each organization only ever sees its own records and schedule.
• A complete audit trail - who flagged, who reviewed, who approved, and exactly when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate - the agent only ever proposes a disposal batch. A records owner reviews it, confirms no legal hold applies, and approves it. Nothing is marked for deletion until a person says so. The tool never auto-deletes.
• Legal holds always override retention - a held record can't be proposed, batched, or disposed.
• Duplicate guards - the dedupe key is record-id + disposal-batch, so the same record can't be disposed twice or land in two open batches.
• Certified evidence - every approved disposal produces a certificate you keep, so you can prove what was destroyed, when, by whom, and under which rule.

Who it's for

Records managers, privacy officers, data protection officers, and compliance teams who have to enforce retention limits and prove they did it - especially anyone juggling a retention schedule in one place and a record inventory somewhere else, with legal holds layered on top.

You've got this. Open the Implementation Plan, paste the first prompt into your AI agent, and let it interview you about your records - by this afternoon you'll have a working retention enforcer with a real audit trail.