Retention
Usually it is not, and usually nobody notices for years. The difference shows up in four questions that only get asked when it matters.
As of: 07.09.2026
Start with the honest version: most small businesses keep their records as files in directories, and for years nothing goes wrong. That is not a failure and not something to feel bad about. It is simply filing that has never been put under load.
It gets put under load on exactly one day: when somebody outside your business wants to see one specific thing, four years after you filed it. Only then does the difference show, and by then it is too late to create it.
The four questions below are that difference. You can put every one of them to whatever you are using today.
Not the folder. The one document, where you still remember the supplier and nothing else.
In a file store the answer depends on how disciplined the naming was, by the person who filed it four years ago. That is precisely where filing fails: not at storing, at retrieving.
In Vaultivo you search across every kind of record at once, and three things are searched: the fields read off the document, such as invoice number, supplier or contract number; the full text of the document; and the original filename. A hit that exists only in the text shows you the place in the text where it is.
A file in a directory can change without anyone noticing. A program rewrites it, a sync restores an older version, somebody opens it and saves. Afterwards it looks the way it looked before.
So a checksum is kept for every document. It is a short value derived from the contents of the file: change a single byte and the value changes. It does not answer whether somebody altered something; it answers the question before that, which is whether anything is different at all.
In the archival package you can have produced, there is such a value for every single file, in a list an ordinary validator can recompute for itself. You do not need us in order to check it, and that is the point.
A directory knows nothing about itself. It has no notion of before, and when a file is missing nobody can say since when.
Vaultivo keeps a record of what happens to your documents: arrival, release, changes to metadata, retention dates that were set, holds, deletions. That record cannot be altered afterwards. This is not a promise made by the application but a rule in the database itself: it refuses updates and deletions of entries in the log.
One limit belongs in the same paragraph, because otherwise you will discover it later: what is recorded is privileged access. When you or your staff look at your own documents, no entry is written. What becomes visible is somebody on our side looking into your account, and that is exactly what you can read in your own log.
The question nobody asks when filing and everybody asks when moving. Storage you cannot get out of completely is not retention, it is a tie.
Vaultivo hands your holdings back in two forms. One is an ordinary ZIP with the files and a summary of them, meant for handing a quarter to your accountant. The other is an archival package that describes its own structure and records, for each document, what happened to it.
That archival package is readable by any archival system, because it follows a published and openly available structure. That is a statement about the file and you can check it. It is explicitly not a statement that any body has certified us.
There is a term for what is described above, and you will find it in other vendors’ advertising. We do not use it about this software, for a substantive reason: it describes a procedure inside a business, not a piece of software. Your procedure can have that property. A program on its own cannot obtain it for you.
Vaultivo carries no certification and no attestation from an auditing body. What does exist is a maintained description of what this application does and how, which you can fold into your own procedural documentation.
That is the less comfortable answer and the only one that still holds four years later.
This piece compares properties of a filing system. It is not tax advice and does not tell you what is sufficient in your case.
What happens when a retention period runs out is the subject of the next piece.