Records management software

Document management is about work in progress: who is writing, who approves, where the current version sits. That is the job of document management software. Records management starts where that stops. A record is a document the organisation has decided to keep as evidence, and from that moment the questions change: under which file plan does it sit, how long must it be kept, who may open it, who signs when it is destroyed.

Answering those questions by hand works until somebody asks for proof. Then the answer has to be reconstructed from folders, mail threads and the memory of whoever ran the archive three years ago. Records management software answers them from the system instead: every case carries its own retention schedule, every access leaves a trace, and every destruction leaves a report you can show.

They are often sold as one word, and that is where projects go wrong. Archiving is about storage: getting documents out of the working system into a place where they stay readable and findable for years. Records management is about the rules that govern them while they are stored.

Our document archiving software covers the storage side, scanning and search included. This page is about the rules side, and in practice most organisations need both at once.

Not with software. It starts with an inventory: what the organisation already keeps, where it physically sits, and under which rule. Most of our projects find paper and electronic records living under different rules, and a file plan that exists on somebody's disk rather than in a system.

The first working result is usually narrow and dull: one approved file plan, one group of cases moved under it, retention terms attached, and the log switched on. That is enough to answer an auditor about that group, and it is enough to show the rest of the organisation what the target state looks like. Scope grows from there, division by division.

Paper is not an obstacle. Scanning and recognition are part of the solution, so a paper case gets the same file plan, the same retention term and the same search as an electronic one.

You choose. The system runs on your own servers, or in Azure in your own region, and the choice is not ours to make for you: data residency is usually decided by your regulator, your head office or your security team, not by a software vendor.

Deployment in the cloud carries the same access control and the same logging as an on-premises installation. Banks run audits against it, which is the only test of that claim that means anything.

If a request arrives to remove everything belonging to one person, that is set up to your rule rather than shipped as a switch: tell us how the request should be handled and we configure it.