Only the Owner role can set and change the retention period.
What is this setting for?
A retention period determines how long GPS coordinates and clock-in photos are kept. Anything older is deleted automatically and permanently every night. That is how you meet the storage limitation principle of the GDPR. All other data stays unchanged. The time registration itself (date, time, duration and employee) remains. Only the location and the photo disappear.
Which period suits your organisation is up to you: it depends on what you use the data for and on your own privacy policy.
Do you see the message “Data retention period not configured yet” on the home page? It disappears as soon as you choose a period and save.
Please note! The setting applies to the entire environment: if several companies share the same environment, the chosen period applies to all of them at once.
Setting the retention period
Go to Management > Settings > Data & Privacy.
Open the Retention period dropdown.
Choose the period you want to apply: 30, 60, 90, 180 or 365 days, or No expiration if nothing may be deleted.
Click Save in the top right to confirm.
This screen also shows when the last clean-up ran. As long as none has taken place, it reads “No clean-up has been performed yet”.
How does the clean-up work?
The clean-up runs automatically every night. It deletes all GPS coordinates and photos older than the period you set. You do not have to do or confirm anything yourself.
The period moves along with time. With a retention period of 30 days, the photo of a registration from 1 March disappears the night after 30 March, and the one from 2 March a night later.
The deletion is permanent: the data cannot be recovered afterwards.
How do you recognise cleaned-up data?
For a time registration whose location has been wiped, the location icon stays in place (the inverted droplet in the time entry overview). Click it and a message tells you the data has been wiped once the retention period has passed.
Changing or switching off the retention period
You can adjust the period at any time. What that does:
Shortening it (for example from 365 to 90 days):
At the next nightly clean-up, everything older than 90 days disappears in one go.
Extending it (for example from 30 to 180 days)
Data is kept longer from then on. Anything already deleted does not come back.
Switching to no expiration date:
The nightly clean-up stops. Here too, deleted data does not come back.