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SIOG10345 | Procedural matters: records management and retention: naming convention principles

From HM Revenue & Customs · Specialist Investigations Operational Guidance

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).