Retention period

A retention period is a fancy way of saying how long you need to keep something, like your toys or your clothes, before you get rid of them. Just like your parents might tell you to clean your room and get rid of toys you don't play with anymore, companies and organizations also have to clean out their stuff after a certain amount of time.

For example, if a company collects a lot of important papers, they have to decide how long they need to keep them before throwing them away. This is called the retention period. The retention period depends on what kind of papers they are, and how long the company thinks they might need them for.

So, if the papers are really important, like records of how much money a company has made, they might have to keep them for a long time, like many years. But, if the papers are not that important, like the records of what snacks people bought from a vending machine, the company might only need to keep them for a few months.

The retention period is like a rule that companies have to follow to make sure they keep important information long enough to be useful, but not so long that they're just cluttering up the place.