An archive that survives any review
The only measure that matters: how fast can you produce a two-year-old document?
In any review the question is not whether you have the document — it is: produce it. And the difference between a company that answers in minutes and one that answers in days is not the size of the archive; it is how it was built.
Link the document to the transaction, not the date
The archive that fails a review most often is the one organised by date alone. A request does not arrive with a date — it arrives with a client name, an invoice number or a specific transaction, and you find yourself opening whole months of folders to search. Every supporting document should be link…
Permissions are not extra complexity
Many companies postpone permissions in order to finish the digitisation first. The result is an archive that anyone on the network can open, edit and delete from. Permissions are not only protection — they are what makes an access log mean anything. An archive with no permissions has no real log, be…
The access log
A log of who opened which document, when, and what they did with it. It looks unnecessary until you need it — at which point it is the difference between demonstrating the integrity of your records and having no answer. Modern systems do this automatically with no extra effort from the user. What ma…
A backup is not optional
Paper is lost, burned and soaked — and those are real reasons companies have lost entire archives. Digital solves that, but only if a second copy exists somewhere else. A digital archive on a single server with no backup carries exactly the same risk, just in a different form.
Test the archive before someone else does
Ask someone on your team to produce three documents from two years ago, and time it. If it takes more than two minutes per document, the archive needs work. This test exposes things no internal review catches — inconsistent naming, missing documents, files that are not searchable. And the best time …
More guides
How to choose the right printer
Five questions to answer before you spend a pound, and a guide to the right model.
Inkjet vs laser — which one suits you
An honest comparison of speed, quality, cost per page and maintenance — no marketing spin.
The true cost per page — the number nobody tells you
A 4,000 EGP printer can cost you more than a 14,000 one within two years. Here's the maths.