Start with categories, not rows. Payment events, access events, and support notes often deserve different clocks. Ask legal which category maps to which obligation; then encode the answer as a label your export includes.
Legal hold is not “never delete”
A hold should pause purge for named cases. Everything else continues on schedule. Teams that freeze the entire archive for months create storage problems and muddy the trail of what was supposed to expire.
Document the gap
If a vendor cannot purge a field, write that in the pack appendix. Reviewers in the United Kingdom have seen imperfect systems; they have less patience for silent surprises.
Our retention workshop inside Archive Command walks a team through one policy paragraph until purge jobs and labels match.