Recordkeeping Requirement
A recordkeeping requirement is a rule — from law, regulation, policy, standard, or operational need — that obliges an organization to create, capture, retain, protect, or dispose of specific records in a defined way.
Recordkeeping requirements are the external and internal obligations that tell an organization which records it must make and keep, in what form, for how long, and under what protections. They flow from many sources at once: statutes and regulations, contractual terms, professional standards, court and audit expectations, and the organization’s own business processes. Together they define what “complete and reliable” recordkeeping looks like for a given activity.
They matter because they convert vague intentions into concrete program controls. A retention schedule, a file plan, and a recordkeeping system all exist to satisfy underlying requirements; identifying those requirements is the first analytical step before any schedule is written or system is built.
For example, a regulation may require that a transaction be documented, that the record be unalterable, and that it be kept for seven years — three distinct requirements bundled in one rule. For electronic records, requirements increasingly trace to the Universal Electronic Records Management Requirements and FERMI rather than the older DoD 5015.2 endorsement, which NARA revoked in 2022.