Read this when: something has to be kept and found again years later, or a keeping term has to be decided.
Contracts, policies, tax papers, certificates, the receipt you would need if the washing machine broke. Things you hold on to because a contract runs, because someone may still ask for them, or because you would be stuck without them.
The three periods are Zanmai's own, chosen so that nothing you need disappears: kept for good, ten years, four years. They are not statutory retention periods, they are not tied to any country, and they are not advice about what a law requires of you. Where a rule genuinely applies to you, the figure you were given applies and not this one. Nothing here is ever presented as a deadline, and no period is ever named as if it came from a law.
The word archive suggests something you are done with. This one is not that. It is the filing cabinet: things go in because you take them out again, and what makes them worth keeping is a running contract, an open question, or the fact that you would be stuck without them. The tax papers stay for as long as the tax office may ask, the policy for as long as a claim can be made on it, the birth certificate for good.
So every piece carries a date and a keeping reminder, and letting one go is a decision with a date attached rather than tidying up. The reminder reminds; it never deletes.
The other thing that sets this area apart is its pace. Everywhere else in the space something happens daily. Here a document arrives, and then nothing happens to it for years. What eventually moves it is a term running out, not a change of mind.
The first time material would go there, Zanmai says what it is about to do and asks you two things about it. Not a form and not a list to tick: it states the picture and you correct it.
- What it takes as belonging there. Zanmai has already looked at your material, so it names the sorts of document it found rather than asking you to remember yours. The question is only whether something is missing from that or something is too much. Whatever turns up later with no rule is asked about once, when it turns up, and remembered after that.
- The keeping terms. How long each sort is held, printed as it stands. They are on the long side deliberately, because holding a document too long costs disk space while letting go of it early can cost you a claim. So the question is whether they suit or you want changes, and yes is a normal answer. Zanmai does not ask which country you are in: it is not giving legal advice, and a list of legal areas would be wrong for everybody not on it.
The name is not asked. The area is called archive.
What you confirm lands in zanmai/retention.json, and that file is what applies. The suggestions
shipped with Zanmai apply to nothing until you have been through them. Nothing is filed before that.
It arrives the way everything arrives, through inbox. A scanner drops a PDF there, you drop a
photo of a receipt, a mail export lands in it. It gets read, and then it gets a place and a term.
The original is not rewritten. What gets written is a note about the matter it belongs to: the policy, the vehicle, the case. The individual letter is not turned into a note of its own, because a hundred and twenty pay slips as a hundred and twenty notes turn up in every search you make for years afterwards. Their words go into a search index instead, which nobody reads and everybody can question.
A single letter answers nothing. What answers something is the matter it belongs to: this policy, this employment, this car, this dispute. So the matter is what gets written down, once, and every document that arrives becomes a line in its history.
Ask "does the household policy still run" and the answer comes from the matter, not from searching twenty letters for the word "cancelled". Ask "what belongs to the tax year" and the matter lists it in the order it happened.
You get a contact entry for whoever a matter runs with: the insurer, the landlord, the employer, the bank. Not for every sender on every receipt. The shop you bought a bike from once is a line on a document, findable in the index in seconds, and turning it into a contact would leave you with hundreds of entries that lead nowhere.
A counterparty gets one name, however many ways it was written on paper. The same insurer turns up as three spellings over ten years, and when they become three entries, one matter silently becomes three. Where two spellings might be the same, you get asked; they are never merged behind your back, because a wrong merge is invisible afterwards and takes both matters with it.
A pile at a time, not a document at a time. Point Zanmai at the folder and say which bundle in the archive it belongs in; the folders you already sorted it into are kept, because you have already answered the question of what belongs together. Everything filed is read straight away, so it answers a search the moment it lands.
Nothing is read out of a file's name. What a file is comes from the file itself, so a scan saved without an extension, a contract that exists only as a saved web page and a mail exported under some other name are all read the same way. What genuinely carries no text, a recording or a video, is still filed and still findable by name.
Two different questions, two different answers.
"Where does this word appear" is answered by the index: every readable document, searched in seconds. PDFs with a text layer are read directly, scans are read by machine, mails and images too.
"Does this still apply" is not a search question, and no index answers it. That is what the notes are for: a policy that says it was cancelled, a contract with an end date, a case that closed. The curator of this area answers from those.
Three buckets, and nothing finer than that. Four years for everyday proof with no contract behind it, ten years for money and contracts, and for good for what cannot be reissued. Anything a rule somewhere would put at a year or two goes in the four-year bucket instead, and anything beyond ten years is simply kept: past that point the difference is theoretical, and a disk is cheaper than a paper you no longer have.
Alongside the bucket, each kept document has a state: active while the matter runs, retention-bound while a rule says it has to stay, evidence-only where there is no duty but you would want it, and expired once the term has run out.
Expired does not mean gone. It means it may go, and the decision is still yours: Zanmai proposes, names how many pieces and which terms it rests on, and waits. Nothing is discarded on a date alone.
- How the space is organised, where this area sits among the others
- Importing and filing material, how things get in
- Who does what