Choose how long to keep past booking and visit information in Skedda through your 'Data retention' setting.
Learn more in the FAQs section!
Data retention period setting
Skedda periodically and automatically deletes bookings and visits older than your data-retention period. The options range from 0 days (i.e. remove bookings and visits that finished before "today") to 7 years.
The default retention period for new accounts is one year. If you're subscribed to a Skedda plan that offers it, you can opt for a longer retention period if you need it.
Upgrading or downgrading your Skedda plan won't automatically change your retention period value (i.e. you always need to set your desired retention period on the settings page shown above). This ensures that your data retention period is predictable, and you won't get any surprises. Note however that it won't be possible to create new bookings and visits on your account if you have selected an extended retention period (i.e. longer than one year) that your current Skedda subscription doesn't support.
Repeating/recurring bookings retention
Repeating/recurring bookings are only deleted once the end time of the last occurrence is older than your retention setting (i.e. you might see some repeating-booking occurrences still on your scheduler outside your data-retention period if they belong to a repeating series that still has occurrences within your data-retention period).
The importance of a short retention period
In the age of the GDPR and similar data-protection legislation around the globe, Skedda helps you fulfill your obligations by minimizing the storage of old data that is no longer necessary to keep. In the GDPR this is referred to as the “Storage limitation" principle.
We recommend that you think carefully about the appropriate retention period for old bookings and visits on your account. Unless you have clear reasons for doing so (perhaps related to taxation, auditing, compliance or similar), we recommend choosing the shortest possible retention period as per data-protection best practices. An added benefit of choosing a short retention period is that the general performance of your account will tend to be higher (i.e. less information on your account that needs to be filtered when loading/processing requests).
FAQs
Can I keep my bookings / visits for longer than 7 years? I need 10!
Skedda offers a data-export feature for bookings which gives you some additional options. If you want to keep a backup/copy of booking information in your own storage for 10 years, but only keep it on Skedda for one year, then you could set your Skedda data-retention period for bookings to one year while periodically exporting them (e.g. export the previous year's bookings on January 1 every year and save the file in your own external storage).
Similar functionality exists for the exporting of visitor data, which we recommend you do alongside such booking-data exports if you need this information longer term.
Does this setting affect how far into the future I can book?
No, this setting just pertains to past bookings. To limit how far in advance users can book, use a booking window rule.
Why do I see bookings and visits older than my set data retention period?
There are a few possible explanations for this:
These bookings and visits may still be in the process of automatic deletion. If you change your retention period from a long value to a short value (e.g. changing from 1 year to 0 days), then it may take some days for Skedda to "catch up" to your new setting (i.e. delete all the bookings and visits that are older than the new setting) because bookings and visits are only deleted in small batches at a time. Additionally, Skedda's background job that processes bookings and visits for deletion executes only periodically, so it can take up to 30 hours to process bookings and visits for deletion.
These bookings may be recurring/repeating. These are deleted once the end time of the last occurrence is older than your retention setting.