File Retention

This section of the Administrator allows you to specify the length of time for which different categories of SmarterPay files or documents are to be kept in your system before being deleted or archived.

SmarterPay stores a lot of information. Each time you receive report files or create new payment files the amount of data that SmarterPay has to maintain is increased. There will come a time when the data that SmarterPay is storing is no longer needed by you. To allow you to decide how long you keep data for, SmarterPay uses retention periods. These are periods of time associated with a certain type of data that indicate how long you wish to keep that type of data.

To see the File Retention section, click on the File Retention icon in the Administrator. This will bring up the single page of the Retention Periods section, as shown below.

The Retention Periods section only has one page. This consists of a data area with columns labelled File Type and Days, below which is a section labelled Retention period value. A description of each column and field can be seen below.

This column describes the action that will be taken on different categories of SmarterPay files after the specified period of time. These cover:

The default period is 30 days. “Sent submissions” refers to files relating to submissions that have been processed by Bacs and for which a processing report (input/withdrawal) has been received and read. The submission will be archived 30 days after the earliest processing date of the submission, providing the processing report has been read.

The default period is 365 days. Submission and payment data will be kept in the system for 365 days after the earliest processing date of the submission, before being deleted. After this time, submission and payment data, along with associated files on disk and related processing reports, will be deleted from the system permanently.

The default period is 120 days. The Bacs Advices that will be deleted are any reports received from Bacs that are not of the type ReftArrival, ReftrArrival, InputReportOfDayHd, InputReportOfDayKm, Rejection, TestInput, WithdrawalReport or SubmissionResults. They will be kept for 120 days after their creation date at Bacs (not the date they were downloaded to your system) before being deleted from the system permanently.

This column shows the number of days after which the action will be carried out on each category of file. You may change this value by editing it in the Retention period value section below.

This section contains a field whose label changes according to the file type that has been selected. For files that are to be deleted, the label will be Days before removal. For files that are to be archived, the label will be Days before archiving. If you highlight any line in the list above, you will see the figure from its Days column appear in this field. You may then edit it if you wish.

If you do change any values, the Cancel and Save buttons will become enabled. Click Save to keep the changes you have made, or click Cancel to discard the changes.