An app from Excelano
Slipcase Fileroom
Records management on the file shares you already have.
Your records are already files in folders. Slipcase Fileroom leaves them there, keeps the retention facts inside each file, tells you which records are due for destruction and why, and destroys them in a way you can account for afterwards. For Windows and the Mac, and for reading on Debian and Ubuntu.
Free to download and read everything. Writing needs a subscription.
Records that stay files
Most organizations keep their records on file shares, and most of them know they are keeping too much. Invoices from a decade ago, personnel files of people who left years back, contracts that ended long before anyone thought to look. Destroying them is the easy part. Knowing which ones may go, proving that nothing under a legal hold went with them, and being able to show afterwards what was destroyed and on whose authority is the part that stops it happening.
The usual answer is a records system: a database, a server, an import, and records that now live somewhere else. Slipcase Fileroom does not move anything. Each record is a Slipcase container, an ordinary ZIP file holding the document and a short description of it, and the description carries what records management needs: the retention series the record falls under, the dates that start its clock, any hold that stops the clock, and the record’s own log of every change made to it. The files stay on your shares, in your folders, under your permissions.
What you can do
See what is due. Open a records root and the Queue sorts every record by where it stands under the schedule in force: eligible for destruction, held, waiting on an event such as the end of a contract, due for a person to review, not yet due, or impossible to evaluate. Each record carries its reasoning, from the series and the dates to the hold that keeps it.
Destroy them in a way you can account for. Choose eligible records and write a plan. Someone with the approver’s role approves it, under their own Microsoft 365 sign-in where your root requires one. Running it means typing the number of records it will destroy. Every record is checked again at the moment of destruction, and one that changed since the plan, or came under a hold, is skipped. A run that was interrupted is recovered, not repeated.
Keep the proof. Every batch produces a certificate as an archival PDF (PDF/A-2a and PDF/UA-1) naming each record, who approved the plan, who ran it and on which machine. The batch joins a register whose hash chain can be verified at any later date, so a gap or an edit shows.
Hold what has to be held. A hold matter’s scope is a condition over the records, and the hold applies to every record that matches, including records filed after it was placed. A held record does not appear in a plan, and the run refuses it even if it did.
Bring your schedule. Retention schedules come in from a spreadsheet, CSV or Excel, with a saved mapping of its columns. Before a new version takes effect you see which records each change would move. A series can be kept for a minimum, a fixed period or a maximum, cut off at the calendar or fiscal year, or sent to a person for review.
Look after the rest. Capture existing files as records, classify them, group them into aggregations such as a contract file, renumber them, hand them to another custodian. Each change is shown first as the exact set it affects, then applied record by record with a report. A fixity sweep checks every record’s content against the digest recorded when it was captured.
Your records outlive the application
A records system you cannot leave is a liability with a renewal date. So the parts of Slipcase Fileroom your records depend on are not Excelano’s to withhold.
The format is the Slipcase Records Profile, published under CC0: what a record carries, how a schedule is read, how eligibility is computed, and how the register of destructions is kept. The code that reads records, computes eligibility, destroys files and keeps the register is fileroom, open source under the MIT licence, with a command-line tool that verifies a register without this application. Any ZIP tool opens a record. If you stop paying, the download still reads everything; if Excelano stopped existing, your records would still be files that say what they are.
Who did it, on record
Every change records who made it, and a records root decides how that person is known. One person’s own files are operated from the application’s settings. A small team keeps a people list in the root, with each person’s roles. An organization on Microsoft 365 signs its operators in against its own tenant, and approval is then the approver’s own sign-in rather than a name typed by someone else. The sign-in goes to your tenant and nowhere else.
Pricing
Reading is free. The download opens any records root and shows everything in it: the records and their history, the Queue, the holds, the register and its certificates. Nothing about reading expires.
Writing is a subscription, bought in the Microsoft Store or the Mac App Store by the person who manages the records: $149.99 a year, with a one-week free trial, or $19.99 a month. In the euro countries it is €149.99 and €19.99; the stores set other currencies. Only the people who change records need one: the records manager and approvers who sign off a destruction plan. Everyone else reads with the free download.
For an organization, Excelano issues a license for a records root against an invoice, for any number of operators. Get in touch for a quote.
Debian and Ubuntu
Slipcase Fileroom is packaged for the Excelano apt repository, for amd64 and arm64. Add the repository once, then install; updates arrive with apt upgrade like any other package:
curl -fsSL https://excelano.com/apt/setup.sh | sudo sh sudo apt install slipcase-fileroom
There is no store on Linux to buy a subscription in, so here it reads: every root, every record and its history, the Queue, the holds and the register. Writing is on Windows and the Mac.
Try it on a sample
Slipcase Fileroom shows nothing until it is given a records root, so here is one: the records of Calder Freight Co., an invented trucking company with about two hundred records across finance, HR, operations and contracts, a retention schedule, three hold matters, a contract file, and one disposal batch with its certificate.
On Windows, extract the archive to C:\, so that you have C:\FileroomSample; the root names its share at that path. Open Slipcase Fileroom, press Open root…, choose C:\FileroomSample\root, and enter any email address as the operator. Then press Evaluate on the Queue.
On a Mac, take the Mac edition of the same records, which names its share where a Mac keeps it, and extract it into /Users/Shared, so that you have /Users/Shared/FileroomSample. Then choose /Users/Shared/FileroomSample/root in the same way.
It reports to nobody
Excelano receives nothing from Slipcase Fileroom. There is no Excelano server behind it, no account with Excelano, no analytics, no telemetry and no crash reporting. It connects to the store it came from, the Microsoft Store or the Mac App Store, to learn whether you hold a subscription, and to your own Microsoft 365 tenant, only for a root that signs its operators in. The full statement is in the privacy section.
Support
For questions, bug reports, or feedback, email support@excelano.com. Replies typically arrive within one business day.
Records management on file shares is work I take on for clients as well, from writing the retention schedule to the first disposal run. If that is what your organization needs, get in touch.