Document retention lets you automatically delete completed documents in a workflow. It helps your organization control how long signed, filled, or otherwise completed documents stay in the system after the workflow is finished.
This can be useful for teams that work with sensitive personal or business information and need to reduce stored data without manually tracking and deleting documents.
Who is this for?
Document retention is designed for teams and organizations that:
Work with sensitive personal data, including healthcare, legal, HR, or finance teams
Follow internal or regulatory data retention policies
Need to reduce how long completed documents are stored
Want automatic cleanup instead of manual document deletion
This feature isn't available by default. To request access, please contact your account manager or reach out to Support.
Set up auto-delete
Choose which completed documents in a workflow should be permanently deleted automatically.
Open the workflow you want to configure.
Click More actions in the top-right toolbar.
Select Document retention.
Choose one of the available settings:
None
New documents
All documents
Click Apply.
Retention settings
None
Auto-delete is off. Documents remain in the workflow until you manually delete them. No documents are deleted automatically.
Use this option when you don’t want to apply automatic deletion to this workflow.
New documents
Only new completed documents will be deleted automatically. Documents completed after this setting is turned on will be permanently deleted. Documents that already existed in the workflow before this setting was applied aren’t affected.
Use this option when you want automatic deletion to apply only going forward.
All documents
All eligible documents in the workflow will be deleted automatically. Documents with no status changes in the last 48 hours will be permanently deleted. This includes existing documents and new documents added to the workflow after the setting is applied.
Use this option when you need the strictest cleanup policy for the workflow.
Important notes
Deletion is permanent. Documents removed by auto-delete can’t be recovered.
Document retention is configured per workflow, so different workflows can use different retention settings.