SIOG10345 - Procedural matters: records management and retention: naming convention principles
A set of principles has been developed to provide consistency of approach across HMRC in the way that we store documents electronically. The benefits of storing documents in this way are:
- to provide a simplified way of storing and locating information
- to provide transparency through the business. It will be easier for people to review material, grasp the sequence of events and see the current position
- efficiency in responding to legislative requests, for example GDPR and FOI requests.
You should use the following naming convention for any documents you are storing on your IT system:
- Use spaces rather than underscores (‘_’) to separate words in file names
- The current date in reverse order (that is YYMMDD)
- Customer name
- Document name. Please make sure you retain the same name throughout the life of the document regardless of the amendments you may make to it
- The author’s initials
- If there is likely to be more than one version of the document, you should include a version number. The convention for this is that drafts are shown as v0.1, v.0.2 and so on; final or approved versions are shown as v1.0, v2.0 and so on and minor amendments to final or approved versions are shown as v1.1, v2.1 and so on.
- For documents circulated for comment - track changes and save the document under its original name. If the author adopts the comments, they should change the date and version number of the document.
- For documents forwarded for authorisation, for example a Registration Report; if a Team Leader makes additional comments on a document and subsequently authorises it, this should become the latest version. It should be saved with a new date, the Team Leader’s initials and the new version number.
It is very important that you destroy all historical versions of a document in accordance with the Freedom of Information (link is external) (FOI) and General Data Protection Regulations (link is external) (GDPR).