Expiration reminders

Never let a compliance document go stale again.

A document that reached its expiration date six months ago is a compliance liability. A SOP that references a regulation that changed two years ago. A policy that was meant to be reviewed annually and hasn’t been reviewed in three. An emergency-response procedure that refers to a team structure that no longer exists. The cost of stale documents isn’t hypothetical — it shows up as audit findings, compliance fines, and incidents where people followed an obsolete procedure.

docs365.ai turns expiration tracking into an operational routine.

Expiration as a first-class metadata field

Every document can carry an expiration date (or next-review-due date) as a metadata field. This isn’t a custom attribute the customer has to invent — it’s a first-class field the product understands, drives behavior from, and surfaces in reports.

Customers typically set review cadences at the document-type level:

• Annual review for most operational SOPs.
• Biennial review for standing corporate policies.
• Per-regulatory-change review for documents tied to specific regulations.
• Ad-hoc review for documents outside a standard cadence.

The automatic reminder

As the expiration date approaches, the system emails the document’s owner automatically. The email contains:

• The document name and protocol code.
• The expiration date.
• A link to the document.
• A call to action — “review this document; update or re-certify as needed.”

Default reminder lead time is 30 days before expiration, with additional nudges as the date gets closer. The exact cadence is configurable per document type or per customer.

What the owner does

The document owner has three options when a reminder arrives:

1. Review and re-certify. If the document is still accurate and current, re-approving it re-stamps the expiration date without changing the content.
2. Revise. If the document needs updates, the owner drafts a new minor version, routes it through the approval flow, and the resulting new major version gets a fresh expiration date.
3. Retire. If the document is no longer applicable, it moves to archive. The owner documents why.

All three paths are captured in the audit log, so the “what did we do when this document expired?” evidence is automatic.

Proactive review, not silent auto-delete

This is the philosophical distinction worth naming. Passive retention — SharePoint’s native retention labels, Microsoft Purview policies — auto-archive or auto-delete documents after a set period. That’s appropriate for records management (emails, operational artifacts) but wrong for compliance documents that need active review.

Active review — our expiration-reminder pattern — prompts the owner to make a conscious decision. Nothing happens automatically. The document doesn’t change state without a human in the loop. The evidence of the review decision is captured.

The two mechanisms are complementary. Purview retention still applies at the tenant level. Our expiration reminders operate on top, for documents where the review cadence matters.

Plan availability

Expiration reminders are included on Enterprise, Premium, and Diamond plans. The Business plan covers the core lifecycle (create, approve, publish, version, archive, audit) without the reminder layer. Customers on Business typically manage expirations manually against their own calendars; customers who have outgrown manual tracking move to Enterprise.

What the dashboard shows (Enterprise+)

The Power BI dashboard surfaces expiration risk at the aggregate level:

• Documents expiring in the next 30 days.
• Documents expiring in the next 60 days.
• Documents expiring in the next 90 days.
• Documents overdue for review.
• Review-cadence adherence by department or document type.

For compliance officers preparing for audits, this aggregate view is the dataset they work from.

What this feature prevents

• Expired policies still being treated as current. Reminders force an explicit review decision before the date.
• “Annual review” that turns into four-year review. The reminder email arrives whether or not anyone remembers.
• Audit findings on stale documents. Reviewers have the evidence that review actually happened on cadence.
• Silent auto-deletion of documents that shouldn’t have been deleted. Expiration reminders make the review active, not passive.

Related features

• Audit log — every reminder event and every re-approval is captured.
• Custom metadata — expiration date is a first-class metadata field.
• Power BI reporting — the aggregate expiration-risk view.
• Active document lifecycle guide — deep dive (coming in a later content wave).

Lifecycle stage: Govern →